Competing in a spelling bee is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes, the difference between victory and loss is one incorrect vowel and you’re undone, months of training reduced to nought.
At a small theatre hall in Sydney’s west on Friday afternoon, 34 primary school students sat stony-faced on a brightly lit stage, knowing this pressure only too well. All had made it past about 200,000 students who competed in spelling bees across 1,070 public schools in New South Wales. The finalists earned their place at this year’s state competition after winning online regional finals in August. They represent the top 0.03%. And they’re not here to mess around.
Five were competing for a third time, having progressed to the last stage in the junior competition. Among them were year 5 student Wafiq Ayyash from the Hunter region, who won the junior state title in 2024, and year 6 student Bobby Ivaneza from the inner west, who was runner-up the same year. Ewan Mattick from the state’s central west, Caleb Borg from the Riverina, and Alesha Kahfandi from the Hunter had also qualified for the state finals on three occasions. This isn’t their first rodeo.
The format is relatively simple. Contestants began with “seen” words that they’d been able to practise at home, before facing “unseen” words testing their broader skills and composure. Each round was sudden death.
To kick off, they were introduced to the crowd by the host, ABC presenter Rae Johnston, with colourful details. Archie Griffith likes the Parramatta Eels and his dachshund puppy. He doesn’t like his dad’s jokes. Ivaneza, wearing a bright red sweatband, admires Nicola Tesla, a Serbian-American engineer who died in 1943, for his genius. Ivaneza’s favourite food is camembert.
The students were as diverse as the schools they came from. Some 23 speak a language other than English at home, and 18 had travelled from outside Sydney.
Seven went down in the first round, stumbling over obscure words like “tourmaline” and “malapropism”. Another seven were out in round two - but you try spelling “lepidopterist” at home.
In the next four rounds, 13 students fell. Mattick nailed “centurion” and gave a thumbs up to his family. Come round seven, Kahfandi began to pray. “Pernicious” and “sagacious” brought two more students down. And then there were five: Afeef Ahmed, Ivaneza, Kahfandi, Caroline Wang, and Maximilian Lumley, all in year 6. Two were returning finalists.
In round eight, they all spelled their words correctly, though Ivaneza, usually breezing through with confidence, restarted on “whimsical”. Then, in round nine, he was asked to spell “unserviceable” and omitted the second “e”. Ivaneza, visibly devastated, slumped into his seat and placed his head in his hands. The remaining students spelled their words correctly, and Ivaneza tearily returned to his family in the crowd and the comforting embrace of his father. The heartbreak was palpable.
Then, in an instant, after Ahmed correctly spelled “immemorial”, the remaining three competitors fell. Kahfandi missed “antepenultimate”, Wang got tied up by “parmigiana” and Lumley was one letter off getting “genealogy”. Ahmed had won.
“We are in an interesting situation,” Johnston said. “We need to play for a runner up.” Wang went out straight away after being dealt the word “grandiloquent”. But Kahfandi and Lumley appeared to be in lockstep. For the next five rounds, they were either both correct or both wrong. “We’re just going to keep on going,” Johnston declared. It began to feel that the audience would grow old in this theatre, steadily working its way through the entire Macquarie Dictionary.
But then, Kahfandi missed the word “vociferous”. Lumley approached the microphone and awaited his fate. His word was “apocalypse” and, after a deep breath, he nailed it. The crowd burst into cheers, and Lumley returned to his seat and stared reflectively at the ground, looking like he had endured a war. His grandmother, Sue, was bursting with pride. “It was so stressful,” she said, “and he looked so calm.” “He’s worked so hard. Some of those words, I didn’t even know what they were. We’re very proud.”
Kahfandi was proud of herself, too. “It was very tense in the room, there was a lot of pressure on everyone,” she said. “I feel a bit disappointed I didn’t get second and I was a bit tired after all those rounds, but getting third place is also really good.”
Ahmed was surprised he’d won, but his mother wasn’t. She’d been helping him train for months - half an hour every night before bed. “He reads a lot,” she said. “I knew he would win; he was three-time champion at school.” Asked how he felt when he found out he’d won Ahmed said, at first, he “didn’t realise”. “But then when they said we had a winner, I felt happy,” he said. “The runners-up words were harder than the ones I got.”