By Bill Petzold
Editor
FAIRGROVE — After it was all said and done and 23 competitors had missed words, Caro’s Nicholas Garza stood triumphant at the Tuscola County Spelling Bee.
That’s T-R-I-U-M-P-H-A-N-T, which also was this year’s championship word.
Nicholas, 10 years old and a fourth grader in Mr. Ball’s class at Schall Elementary School, earned a spot in the county bee by besting 12 competitors in the Schall School bee.
But it wasn’t by accident. Nicholas’ mom Sandra Garza said her son put in plenty of hours studying.
“He actually got the list probably two weeks before Christmas break, and during Christmas break, to be honest with you, he studied probably four or five hours every day,” Garza said.
See SPELLING A7
With the help of his sisters Alexandria and Victoria, Nicholas committed the correct spellings of words to memory. The words stuck in his memory well enough that after Christmas break when he stopped studying as much, he still knew the correct spellings of all the words.
“The first try I got a lot of words wrong,” Nicholas said. “Diagonal’ was one of them. And ‘gopher’ — I thought it was g-o-f-e-r because it sounds like an ‘f’.”
Nicholas said the word ‘statistician’ was one that he found particularly challenging.
There also was a bit of sibling rivalry involved in the victory that earned Nicholas family bragging rights.
“You know what’s really neat though, is he actually won the Schall School bee and the Tuscola County bee,” Sandra Garza said. “His older sister (Katie Ramos), she’s in her fourth year of college, she won the Tuscola spelling bee but lost the Schall School spelling bee. … The first thing he said after he won was ‘Mom, my trophy’s bigger than Katie’s.’ ”
“Right when Katie got home, I hugged her and I said, ‘My trophy’s bigger,’ and she got all mad,” Nicholas said.
Vassar Central Elementary School fourth grader Manuel Mendham spelled his way to a second place trophy. Central principal Phil Marcy said participating students studied more than 500 words in preparation for the annual event. Some of this year’s words included: rhetorical, dyslexia and rhinoceros.
“These kids did a wonderful job and all of our participants were very dedicated,” said Central Elementary principal Phil Marcy.
Manuel is the son of Kelly Betzing and Jeremy Mendham.
The third place winner was Lucas Lester who attends Cass City’s Campbell Elementary School.
Staff writer Megan Decker contributed to this report.