Schools
Culver City 8th-Grader To Compete in National Spelling Bee Finals
Good luck and congrats, Cooper Komatsu! Perhaps top-notch spelling skills run in his family - his grandfather competed in 1955!
LOS ANGELES, CA -- A Culver City eighth-grader will be among 45 spellers competing in today's finals of the 89th Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Maryland, out of an initial field of 285.
Cooper Komatsu, who attends Culver City Middle School, correctly spelled the words tagasaste -- a small evergreen tree -- and adventitious -- an adjective describing something that occurs by chance, during Wednesday's second
and third rounds.
Cooper also competed in last year's bee, correctly spelling both of his semifinal words, but did not score high enough on two multiple-choice spelling and vocabulary tests to be among the 10 spellers to qualify for the
championship finals.
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The format of this year's bee has changed, with the second spelling and vocabulary test dropped.
Cooper qualified for the national bee on March 15 by winning the Los Angeles County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee for the second consecutive year. Cooper is 13 years old and teamed with Jem Burch to win the North American School Scrabble championship last month.
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Cooper has studied Japanese since he was a kindergartener and likes how it connects him to his ancestors' culture. He has a passion for geography, maps and discovering new places. Social studies and math are his favorite subjects.
Cooper is a member of his school's cross country and robotics teams and a Boy Scout. He is a Los Angeles Clippers fan but says he also loves the Los Angeles Lakers. His maternal grandfather, Robert Rosenberg, competed in the
1955 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The bee is intended "to inspire children to improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives,'' according to Paige Kimble, the bee's executive director and 1981 champion.
The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below, with contestants ranging in age from 6 to 15 years old.
The original field consisted of students who won locally sponsored bees in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Department of Defense schools in Europe. Six foreign nations were also represented -- the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan and South Korea.
The first segment of the finals will be shown on ESPN2 from 7-10 a.m. and the second from 5-7 p.m. today on ESPN.
The finals can also be seen on the WatchESPN app.
Throughout the bee, ESPN3 and WatchESPN will have a multiple-choice "Play-Along'' version, where viewers will have a one-in-four chance to pick the correct spelling.
Informational boxes highlighting the word's etymology, definition, pronunciation and part of speech, along with live tweets and the speller's biography are also part of the "Play-Along'' version.
What ESPN has dubbed as the "SpellCheck'' feature has been added to the main feed, highlighting each individual letter as the speller spells the word. Correct letters will be highlighted in gold and the first letter the speller gets incorrect will be highlighted in red.
The winner will receive $40,000 from Scripps, which owns television stations, cable networks and newspapers; a $2,500 U.S. savings bond and a complete reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster; and $400 in reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica and a three-year membership to Britannica Online Premium.
--City News Service
