Service Valley student wins state bee

By COLLEEN SURRIDGE

March 23, 2010

The third time was the charm for Service Valley Elementary School seventh-grade student Matthew Wegner of Parsons, who after three wins at the county level took the title of state spelling bee champion in the Great Bend Tribune’s 2010 Sunflower Spelling Bee Saturday.

Wegner’s county win in fourth grade allowed him to compete at state for the first time, and he ended up placing 27th. He won the county bee again in fifth grade, but the school had been unaware of the changes by the Scripps National Spelling Bee requiring schools to pay a fee to enable their students to progress on to the state and national bees if they should win at the county level. By the time Wegner won the county bee and the school found out about the rule, the deadline for submitting the fee to Scripps had passed, so he was not allowed to compete at state.

The missed opportunity at state was not a “humongous” deal, but Wegner said he can not help but imagine what would have happened at the state competition if he had gotten to compete then.

Perhaps those situations helped to set the stage for Wegner to win the state bee this year, giving him added determination and dedication to win.

“I read just for reading’s sake,” Wegner said. “In the weeks leading up to the bee, I spent about an hour a day in the dictionary reading words, studying their origins and their Greek and Latin roots. That helped me a lot.”

His mother, Stephanie Smith, said her son is a typical 13-year-old who loves reading and playing video games.

“Well, he’s a typical 13-year-old except for his loving to read as much as he does,” Smith said. “He has been reading since he was 3, and he is in gifted class. He just loves to read all the time and suck up all the new information he can. He just naturally loves to read and loves words.”

While her son had dedicated a lot of study time to the dictionary, on the trip to Great Bend the night before Smith said she realized he should probably have looked over medical terminology as well. She got on her phone and looked up how to put together the Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes, and he spent time that evening studying.

Coincidentally, Wegner won the state bee by correctly spelling “meloplasty,” defined as plastic surgery performed on the cheek.

“It was just a fluke,” Smith said of her son winning on a surgical term. “He never really struggled with any of the words. There was only one, and with the word’s origin, he was able to get it.”

Seemingly calm and focused, Wegner held his ground through the Sunflower Spelling Bee, correctly spelled “viscidity,” and then meloplasty, to leave Ryan Crist of Sedgwick County and Isaac Nichols of Cowley County to battle for second and third place in the bee. Crist became the first runner-up, and Nichols was second runner-up.

Under the calm veneer, Smith said her son was not as totally composed as he might have seemed.

“I think I was probably as nervous as he was,” Smith said. “And, he was nervous, but he has his own little strategy. He gets himself ‘in the zone,’ as he calls it. He becomes very focused, and he tries to spell all the words the other spellers are given, so he is ready when they call him.”

The self-set goal for Wegner was to at least place at or above where he did in fourth grade.

Apparently finding his place “in the zone” worked, as he said, “I kept spelling all these words, and then all of the sudden I notice there is nobody left except me. It rushed by really fast. I was really in shock for a couple of hours.”

Smith admitted she was in shock as well.

“It was unreal,” she said.

Garnering first place, Wegner won a PlayStation 3, a $200 savings bond, a gift certificate to amazon.com, a brand new dictionary and a year’s subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica.

“And he won the trip to Washington to the national bee,” Smith said. “He is very excited to be going to Washington. He is a history buff anyway, and we will be staying about five blocks away from the White House, and he will get to see the museums and monuments. And he is really excited to be able to compete against students from other states.”

The Scripps National Spelling Bee will be May 31 through June 4.

“I’ve never really been out of the general area — Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas — so it will be cool to be on a plane and go to Washington, D.C., for a week. I’m really looking forward to the Smithsonian because I am really interested in history,” Wegner said. “It’s going to be really cool.”

Getting all the awesome prizes made Wegner exceptionally happy, and he said the prizes will be put to good use — one in particular to prepare for the national competition.

“I’ve gotten a couple more books, and one of the things I won, the dictionary they actually pull the words from for the national bee, the new third edition, Webster’s International Dictionary, I will be hitting that a lot,” he said.

Wegner can be accompanied by both his parents, David and Stephanie Smith, on his trip to Washington.

For those who cannot attend, the Scripps National Spelling Bee can be seen on TV June 4. Semifinals can be viewed from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on ESPN, and the finals can be viewed from 8 to 10 p.m. on ABC.

“I am just honored to compete at this level,” Wegner said. “I am really looking forward to it.”