Meant to Bee: Loudonville youth has two spelling titles under his belt
Qualifying for the Ashland County Spelling Bee is a major achievement for sixth, seventh or eighth grade students in Loudonville.
Winning the county bee is a second, even more major achievement.
Winning it twice is virtually unheard of.
However, eighth-grader Adam Carroll, son of Mike Carroll of Loudonville, achieved the unheard of, winning the 2023 Ashland County Spelling Bee for a second time. The contest was held at the Ashland County-West Holmes Career Center on Jan 23.
More:Photo Gallery: 48th Annual Ashland County Spelling Bee
Two years ago he won the bee as a sixth-grader, and he did it again in the seventh and eighth grade competition, held in Ashland against students from Ashland City, Ashland St. Edward and Mapleton junior highs.
He's a class act when it comes to spelling and math
“I have always been very good at spelling, and I am very good at math,” Carroll said.
Among other subjects, he said, “I would like to be very good at history, because I really enjoy it, but I’m not sure I am very good at it. Of all my subjects, English is the hardest for me.”
Carroll has no idea how or why he is so good at spelling.
“It sort of just happens,” he said. “For the sixth grade Spelling Bee, I studied a list of words only to find that none of those words were used in the Spelling Bee. This year, for the eighth-grade Bee, I didn’t study at all.”
Carroll won the seventh-eighth grade contest by correctly spelling bipedal, edging-seventh grader Mary Hamilton of St. Edward. There were eight competitors in the county bee, but only seven competed, with one missing because of a scheduling conflict.
“To compete in the Spelling Bee, I signed up for the competition at the Loudonville Junior High, and then met in a room with other Bee hopefuls, six of them, and I qualified,” he said.
In the competition at the Career Center “we were seated in chairs and when our turn came up, we would go the microphone and be asked to spell a word. If we wanted, we could ask the pronouncer if the word was a homonym, what it’s definition is, what part of speech, the word origin and for the word to be used in a sentence.”
One misspelled word didn't derail the goal
He was fortunate to get away with a miss during the competition.
“I misspelled the word grotesqueness, but fortunately competitors also had misses, so I got a second chance, clinching the event with bipedal,” he said. “Nobody coached me in the Spelling Bee this year. I did it on my own.”
Carroll is a member of the Loudonville Junior High Student Council, and lists as his favorite avocation, “video games.”
At age 14, he said he had no idea what he wants to do when he grows up.
He said he works at jobs his dad gives him around the house, like shoveling snow and, in season, mowing. He said he will probably go to college, but at this point “I don’t know what I will study.”
In addition to the core subjects, math, English-language arts, science and history, he takes medical detectives and agriculture.
“Of these classes,” he said, “English is the hardest for me.”
This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Meant to Bee: Loudonville youth has two spelling titles under his belt
