Cameron Keith punches ticket to spelling-bee finals for third time in five years
It may be time to declare that Boulder’s Cameron Keith has become the Tom Brady of the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) Regional Spelling Bee.
Like Brady—the six-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the New England Patriots football team—if Keith is competing, he’s a good bet to go all the way. He’s been taking home the trophy in BVSD’s bee—thereby punching his ticket to the “Super Bowl” of spelling, the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.—since he was 8, winning three out of the last five regional competitions.
And, just as with Brady, his competition is no doubt looking forward to his eventual retirement. In Keith’s case, that will be after the 2020 competition, which is open only to third- through eighth-grade students.
Like the legendarily cool Brady, the home-schooled seventh-grader takes his success in stride, but already has his eye on the next prize. He’s ready for his fourth trip to the nation’s capital, next week—three times for winning the regional competition, and in 2018 as part of a program that invites previous competitors to return to watch the event even if they haven’t won their regional bee.
“Yeah, definitely,” he says, when asked if having previously performed on the big stage—again, echoes of Brady—is an advantage. “You have more experience, you know how it all works. You have more control over your own nerves.”
His family’s travel to Washington in May is sponsored by the University of Colorado Boulder College of Arts and Sciences, Boulder Rotary Club and BVSD.
“I think it’s fantastic that the college has sponsored the Boulder Regional Spelling Bee for so many years now,” says Keith’s mother, Synte Peacock. “Some parts of the country don’t have sponsorship at all.”
Keith prevailed in this year’s regional competition on Feb. 23 only after six grueling rounds against Henry Stauch of Longmont’s Sunset Middle School, the last competitor standing. Stauch finally stumbled on “bolus,” paving the way for Keith to correctly spell “hedebo”—a kind of Danish embroidery—and earn his third victory.
Peacock describes the ever-changing technology and tools for spelling be preparation as “an arms race” that helps with studying even as it ramps up the pressure. Now, she says, every competitive speller uses , an online subscription resource that has assembled “all the words required for the spelling bee competitions have been arranged and identified in modules … With these word modules, you don’t need to ever look at the dictionary, guaranteed!”
Keith’s previous preparation tool required him to input words himself and record audio pronunciations.
“If he had 200 new words to learn, he used to spend an hour or two inputting them into Quizlet, then adding definitions and pronunciations. After all that, he would have to learn the words,” Peacock says. “With SpellPundit, he can run through 200 words in about 25 minutes.”
Keith hopes to go deep in the national bee—Colorado students have fared well, winning seven times since it began in 1925, second only to Texas—but is sanguine about the caprices of competition. In 2017 and 2018, after all, he stumbled early in regional competition, only to bounce back this year.
“Yeah, it’s not 100 percent preparation. A big part of it is luck,” he says. Ultimately, it comes down to the words you draw.
“That’s an element in spelling bees,” his mother agrees. “That’s an element in spelling bees. You might know every single word in the bee, except the one word you go out on.”
You have more experience, you know how it all works. You have more control over your own nerves.
Keith has learned that adversity and failure have their own rewards. Failing to win the regional bee in 2017 after two consecutive wins, he lost heart. He spent several days feeling that he didn’t want to compete again before deciding to try again.
“He didn’t win in 2018 either, but this time, he didn’t sink as low, and getting back up was easier,” Peacock says. “It always hurts to lose, but he is getting so much more resilient each time he fails. No one has ever got to high levels in spelling—or in any other major national competition—without taking a large number of knocks along the way.”
But 2018 had its high points, too. Last summer, Keith won the Riverside North American Spelling Champion Challenge, arranged by a China-U.S. team. That earned him a week-long trip to China, where he competed in and won the Chinese National Spelling Bee, saw the Great Wall and got to experience life in a Chinese boarding school for a week.
“China was a really great and unique experience. It was completely different from anyplace else I've ever traveled and I really enjoyed it,” Keith says.
Keith didn’t get the luck of the draw, however, when it came to school lotteries, but he hopes to fare better next time and enroll at Summit Middle School for eighth grade. In the meantime, he continues to bone up on spelling and read. He recently finished, “” by science writer Carl Zimmer, which got him interested in molecular biology as a potential field of study down the road.
And, of course, there’s that little trip with his family to this year’s spelling “super bowl”—and one more year of regional competition before he “retires.”
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