A 14–year-old from Twin Peaks Middle School in Poway will head to the East Coast for the national spelling bee later this spring after winning the county’s regional bee Thursday afternoon.
Ben Evans, an eighth-grader, competed for about six hours in the 54th San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee before securing the win by correctly spelling “epihippus,” an extinct genus of the modern horse family.
The event, at the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA in San Diego, brought together more than 80 students, from sixth to eighth grade, from public and private schools countywide.
“It’s exciting,” Evans said after the competition. “I don’t think it’s set in yet fully. It still feels unreal.”
The competition, which lasted 19 rounds, came down to Evans and Mihir Konkapaka, the event’s previous two-time champion from Mesa Verde Middle School in Poway.
Mihir Konkapaka, who won the regional spelling bee the last two years, chatted with fellow contestants at the Jackie Robinson YMCA in Mountain View on Thursday, March 14, 2024, in San Diego. On Thursday, Mihir was the runner-up.
(Alejandro Tamayo/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The spelling bee was organized by ABC 10News and the San Diego County Office of Education. It used a list of 4,000 words from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Unabridged — the official dictionary of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The words increased in difficulty in each round.
Evans said he felt a little stressed at the start but settled in by the event’s middle portion, when he recognized many of the words from his study materials. Since the beginning of February, Evans and his dad, Scott, have used an app with digital flashcards to review words for about an hour each day.
Even with his studying, though, he had never heard the word “epihippus” before.
In May, he will represent San Diego County at the Scripps National Spelling Bee near Washington, D.C. Konkapaka, the runner-up, will be the alternate if Evans is unable to compete.
If Evans wins the national bee, he would join two other San Diego County students who have won that title — including Francis Parker School student Snigdha Nandipati, who won in 2012, and Meadowbrook Middle School student Anurag Kashyap, who won in 2005.
“It’ll be a cool experience no matter where I place,” Evans said about the national bee. “But at the same time, it’s like, what I get for winning (today) is I get to go study some more.”
