While they had competed against each other only sparingly in the past, Clara Wicoff was up against a familiar challenger as she worked to capture her fourth consecutive county spelling crown Wednesday.
It took six words in the champ-ionship round of the Allen County Spelling Bee before Wicoff’s younger brother, Isaiah, misspelled “roux” (a mixture of flour and fat cooked together as a thickening agent for sauces or gravy); he left off the “x.”
Older sister seized on the opening, correctly spelling “annexation” and finally “silhouette” to complete her four-peat.
Wicoff, a seventh-grader at Iola Middle School, will travel to Great Bend March 12 to compete in the Sunflower Spelling Bee, with a berth in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., on the line.
It took 12 rounds in all for Wicoff to defeat her younger brother and 22 other competitors at the county bee. Her tensest moment of the competition came in round 4, when she narrowly avoided disaster while spelling “nonnegotiable.”
“I hesitated between the ‘non’ and ‘negotiable’ because I wasn’t sure if I put in too many n’s,” she said.
As she had in years past, Wicoff’s methodical approach paid off.
With each word, she grilled announcer Virginia Crane about possible alternate pronunciations of words, their country of origin, definition and how the word may be used in a sentence before writing the word into the palm of her hand before spelling it aloud.
Clara and Isaiah competed against each other in an impromptu spelling bee during the Allen County Fair last August. Isaiah, a fifth-grader at Jefferson Elementary School, also competed in the county spelling bee last year.
So do the siblings practice for the bees together?
“Oh, no,” Clara replied. “We’ve tried that before, and it didn’t work out.”
Zachary Cokely, a fifth-grader at Jefferson, captured third place. He was eliminated in round 6 by misspelling “froufrou” (the rustling noise made by somebody walking in a dress.)
Finale a f-a-m-i-l-y a-f-f-a-i-r
