The sweet spell of success

It wasn't spelling tests or extra study time that a St. Regis fifth-grader credits for making him the winner of the St. Regis Spelling Bee — it was a video game.

Dakota Wickham, 10, beat out eighth-grader Jordan Baldwin at the spelling bee in the St. Regis gym last Wednesday by correctly spelling "incognito," a word he had never heard before. Wickham recognized the word he had to spell in the first round, a round where judges Diane Gingerich, Mark Feasel and Monica Wilson raised their red cards on 36 of the 42 competitors.

When the spelling bee moderator Bernie Patterson gave Wickham the word inferno in the first round, Wickham said he instantly recognized it. "I remembered it from Guitar Hero," said Wickham. He said Guitar Hero was one of his favorite games and one he plays on a regular basis.

Wickham's run to the St. Regis spelling championship was almost cut short in the second round. With six spellers remaining, only seventh-grader Spur Hill was able to spell his word correctly, but when Hill misspelled muumuu the five spellers were let back in the bee.

In the third round only Wickham and Baldwin were able to correctly spell their words to move on the fourth round, where Wickham correctly spelled filibuster and Baldwin stumbled with the word sequin, leaving only Wickham standing.

When Wickham correctly spelled incognito, he became the first fifth-grader to win the fifth-eighth grade spelling bee in a long time. "He's the first fifth-grader that's won it since I've been doing it," said St. Regis fifth and sixth grade teacher Gingerich, who has been organizing the spelling bee for six years.

If Wickham was exciting to become the first fifth-grader to win the spelling bee in over six years, he kept his emotions well disguised, or for lack of a better word incognito. "Scary" is how Wickham described winning the spelling bee. What Wickham was nervous about was competing in the Mineral County Spelling Bee, tentatively scheduled to be held in Superior March 13. Wickham, who said he didn't study for the St. Regis spelling bee, said he will definitely study for the county spelling bee. St. Regis will send the top four qualifiers from each grade to the county spelling bee.

Wickham said that when the spelling bee started at 8:45 a.m. and he looked around at the other 40-plus spellers in the gym, the thought that he could outlast them never entered his mind.

"I thought there was no way I was going to win," he said. Wickham said that he had no idea what his parents were going to say when they found out that he had won. "I think they'll be very happy," he said.

Gingerich said that she would've liked to see more of the spellers advance to the second round, but with words like "persimmon" and "prosaic," she had to admit it was a pretty tough spelling bee. "I thought they were much more difficult than they've been in the past," she said, adding that the words came from an official list from Scripps.

Once again, Patterson, a retired St. Regis teacher, was reading the words off of the Scripps list. "He's been the moderator forever, as far as I know. He's been the moderator as long as I've been doing it and he was doing it before that," she said.