Regional winner goes to D.C. for a spell

Lucas Liner, 14, said he has always had "a real knack" for spelling.

He advanced to the regional spelling bee as a fifth and sixth grader, one of the youngest in the competition. But after he didn't make it past his school bee last year, he initially didn't want to try out again.

"To do so well before and then to lose it the next time, it was pretty disheartening," said Lucas, an eighth-grader from Luckey, Ohio. "Needless to say, I'm glad I did it."

Lucas clinched the title at the Blade Northwest Ohio Championship Bee in March and will compete in the National Spelling Bee starting tomorrow.

His trip to Washington and expenses are paid by The Blade.

As it got closer to nationals and the school year wound down, Lucas spent more time studying for the bee than on his schoolwork.

"We go over several pages a night. A lot of times, he'll do two or three of the online tests after he does his homework," Lucas' mother, Amy Taulker, said.

The list of words for the National Spelling Bee includes anything in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, a book so big Lucas couldn't carry it with one hand.

Instead, he focused on a list of 400 words that is meant to point spellers in the right direction.

"Some of the words I've never heard in my life," he said.

The list includes words like "ornithoscopy," which means bird watching, and "rasceta," the creases on the inside of the wrist.

"He has successfully spelled all of them as of right now. That was a six-week process," Ms. Taulker said.

But strict memorization is not enough. Lucas also studies word origins.

"Italian has a lot of double consonants, double letters. German has a lot of the s-c-h spelling," he said.

Lucas' experience in bees has helped prepare him for nationals. For example, the regional bee does not allow contestants to write words down and is not limited to the "Spell It" list used in smaller bees.

"In regionals, I think it's as close to nationals as it gets," he said.

Lucas will be fighting against 272 other spellers to make it past the first round of cuts. He will take a 50-word computer test tomorrow and then compete in on-stage preliminaries Thursday. Spellers will earn points for correctly spelled words.

The 50 spellers with the most points will advance to the semifinals Friday and the championship round Friday night, where spellers are eliminated for misspelled words. Those rounds will be televised on ESPN and ABC, respectively.

Lucas said he is happy to have made it this far, but aims to make it to at least the semifinals to "survive the cuts, if you will," he said.

Lucas will be accompanied by his mother and grandmother, Donna Filiere, on his trip to Washington. It will be his first time in the city.

Prior to leaving, Lucas said he wasn't nervous yet, but he added, "I'm sure on the way there I will be."

Contact Sarah Mervosh at:

smervosh@theblade.com

or 419-724-6050.