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With a name like Emma Johanningsmeier, you'd better be able to spell well.
Emma has heard that one before. She showed she could spell anything thrown her way Saturday as she won the 2010 Midwest Spelling Bee at Creighton University's Harper Center. Anna Meckel of Lincoln took second.
Seventy children competed. Six made it to the final, oral round.
“You have to be a little bit lucky,” Emma, 14, said. “And I was.”
Anna spelled “pansit” correctly, and Emma said she would have struggled with that one.
“I thought she was an amazing speller,” Emma said.
Anna, a home-schooled eighth-grader, went out on the word “patriciate.”
“I wasn't really thinking of winning,” said Anna, who pulled on the bottom of her pink sweater when spelling and sometimes wrote the word on her palm with her finger. “I wanted to win when I got to the final two.”
After Anna's miss, Emma, an eighth-grader at Westside Middle School in Omaha, spelled “quiescency” and “convalescent” to win the title. “Convalescent” was easy compared to many that the six finalists encountered.
Among those that Emma spelled were “bacteriolytic,” “logomachy,” “shoaly,” “foliageous” and “fletcherism.”
Anna correctly spelled “berserker,” “sondage,” “dromomania” and “succedent,” among others.
Other finalists correctly spelled the words “satori,” “chapeau” and “quiche.”
Emma and Anna reached the final, oral round last year, too. Bobby Larsen of Papillion, who represented the region last year at the national spelling bee, took third on Saturday. The eighth-grader missed “geognosy.”
The three other finalists were Dakota Seng of Callaway, Neb.; Anna Bauerle of Imperial, Neb.; and Raymond Boyd of Honey Creek, Iowa.
Emma wore blue jeans, a blue T-shirt and new, dark blue Chuck Taylor basketball shoes. She wanted comfort for a run at the title.
“That was my goal,” she said of winning the tourney. “That's always been my goal.”
“And this is my last year,” she said. “I wanted to make sure to make it count.”
Her parents and two younger siblings pulled for her from an audience of about 80, but the burden of performance was on her.
“We left it to Emma to study as much or as little as she wanted,” said her mother, Gina. “She set her mind to it.”
Her father, Chuck, printed out 350 pages of words for her to study last year. She continued to use that as a resource this year.
The national contest takes place June 2-4 in Washington, D.C.
Emma won an expense-paid trip for two to the national bee, a dictionary, $200 in prize money and other awards. The World-Herald is the primary sponsor of the Midwest Spelling Bee.
Contact the writer:
444-1123, rick.ruggles@owh.com
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