When the 62nd annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee opens in Washington this week, the competition won't be exactly new to the Utah representative, because she was there last year.
But this year, Colleen Huber will be one of the contestants in the spelldown and not a spectator as she was in 1988 when her younger sister was on the large stage facing the word pronouncer, judges, hundreds of reporters and cameramen, and thousands of spectators.Colleen, 14-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Huber, Vernal, is a sister of Tara, 12, who finished 38th out of 200 boys and girls last year.
To compete in the national contest, Colleen won the Deseret News Spelling Bee on April 7 by defeating 40 other district winners. She and a parent are guests of the newspaper during "Bee Week," which begins Monday in the nation's capital.
An eighth-grade student at Vernal Junior High School, Colleen advanced to the state finals by winning the Uintah School District bee.
The Utah spelling bee is sponsored in cooperation with the state Office of Education, Utah PTA and Utah Education Association. A spelling improvement program begins in the fall and continues until early spring, when local and district bees are conducted.
More than 150,000 Utah students in fourth through eighth grades in public, private and parochial schools participate annually.
This year's national contest will include a record 222 youngsters sponsored by newspapers from around the United States as well as Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Mexico. For the first time, the bee will include a speller representing U.S. Department of Defense schools in western Europe, north Africa and Egypt under the sponsorship of Stars and Stripes.
Round one of the spelling bee opens Wednesday morning in the Presidential Ballroom of the Capital Hilton. Each contestant in turn is given a word, and those correctly spelling the word given by pronouncer Alex Cameron will continue into the next round.
Cameron, an English professor at the University of Dayton, has presided over the spelling bee as its official word pronouncer each spring since 1980. He follows Richard Baker, the chairman of the philosophy department at the university, who held the job for about 20 years.
To prepare for his job, he uses the bee's official dictionary, Webster's Third International, to research pronunciations, definitions, roots, homonyms and parts of speech, then writes sample sentences.
Cameron traditionally spends the month of May at his family home in Dearborn, Mich., practicing the pronunciation of such words as the 1988 contest's "prolegomenon," "xystus" and "recrementitious."
Cameron said winners appear to share the trait of being highly literate.
Words for the first two rounds are drawn from the "Words of the Champions" booklet that each district winner received to prepare for the state contest. For the third round, words are taken from a regional word list used to conduct local bees.
But by the fourth round, the contest uses words not found on any study list, Cameron said. The tension mounts as the ranks are reduced on the stage.
"They're on their own, and it's at this point that spellers - who are really pretty well-read and have a lot of outside information - survive," he said.
For this year's competition, Tara will be in the audience along with her parents and another sister, Erin.