National Spelling Bee participant finds inspiration in family

Years before he traveled to Washington, D.C. to represent the Crossroads in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Cole Moore found inspiration in his family.

Cole started competing in spelling bees when he was in second grade but won a bee for the first time in third grade, on the same day his grandmother died.

“She always supported me in the spelling bees, so I decided to keep doing it until I couldn’t do it anymore,” Cole said.

That perseverance paid off this year when he won the Region 3 spelling bee as an eighth grader, giving him a chance to compete in the national competition in May.

During all those years of studying and spelling, Cole said he and his mother, Susan Moore, always prepared for his competitions the same way. As his mom read out words from the bee’s official word list, he would try to spell them, and when he missed one, he’d write it out three times to try and get it to stick in his mind for next time.

Cole Moore, national spelling bee compeitor — Cole Moore poses for a portrait Friday holding his regional champion spelling bee trophy at DeLeon Plaza.

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The competition got a lot tougher in D.C., because the national bee doesn’t just use the official word list — they use the entire dictionary. Some spellers at that level even have private coaches to help them study, Moore said.

Cole said he was “a little nervous” being on stage in Washington, but also that he just tried to treat it like any other bee. His strategy was to ask the pronouncer — the person who tells the speller their word — for all of the word’s information and try to visualize the word in his head, and if he still didn’t know it, to just give it his best guess.

Cole was eliminated during the preliminary round of the national bee after misspelling the word “daguerreotype,” a term for an old form of photography.

Especially without the extensive training that some of the other spellers got, just making it to the national level was a huge accomplishment. Eleven million students competed to make it into the national bee this year, Moore said, but only 234, including Cole, managed to get a spot.