Is the spelling bee fair? Why Wake’s best will miss the Scripps nationals
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- Wake County speller Holden Good won his county bee but did not advance to nationals.
- Three county school systems sponsor directly, Duke runs a bee for Durham and Orange.
- This year the Panthers sent four spellers to nationals from 920 schools statewide.
Like all the state’s top spellers, Holden Good studied word lists for five hours a day — eight on Saturdays.
He won Wake County’s bee, but slipped statewide by missing a word he knew: dysbarism — an obscure term relating to medical conditions caused by changes in atmospheric pressure.
No sore losers in his family.
But they can’t help but think that if Holden lived in Durham, Smithfield or Dunn, he’d be heading to the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the second straight year.
North Carolina’s system treats a speller in Raleigh far differently, making it harder to A-D-V-A-N-C-E.
“Disappointed,” said Holden, an eighth-grader at Moore Square Middle. “It just seems odd.”
What do the Carolina Panthers have to do with it?
In decades past, spellers from North Carolina all had sponsors — usually the local newspaper. The News & Observer once sponsored Wake spellers.
But that local money started to erode, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, very little of it remained.
At the moment, only three county school systems in North Carolina have their own sponsorship: Johnston, Harnett and Cumberland, while Duke University holds its own bee for Durham and Orange spellers.
The rest of NC’s field gets picked up by the Carolina Panthers, who hold their own regional spelling bee in Charlotte.
So if a speller wins in Durham or Dunn, they advance straight to the nationals in Washington, D.C.
But in Wake or 94 other counties, they must first place highly in the Panthers’ bee, and the Panthers only sent four spellers to Scripps this year — out of 920 schools statewide.
Holden’s mother, Jen Good, points out that the Wake County bee had four competitors this year who had previously been to the Scripps national bee.
Anyone who has witnessed a Wake County bee knows they can easily last five hours with multiple spellers going “off-list,” or beyond the official list of study words, well before the later rounds.
This year, two of the four Panthers-sponsored spellers going to nationals from North Carolina come from Wake. Holden, the Wake winner, finished seventh in the Panthers regional.
“It’s not that there’s something in the water,” his mother said. “They have to study so hard just to get out of their county.”
So many spellers, so few seats
Four spellers from the Panthers bee would seem high considering most sponsors only send one.
But few pick from anywhere near 920 schools, as does the Panthers’ bee.
One Minnesota sponsor sends nine spellers to Scripps with just 305 schools, according to the bee’s data.
Another in Michigan pulls a top speller from only six schools. Most commonly, sponsors handle a few dozen.
“I’m not going to try to get my kids to win everything,” said Good. “When we drove away from the Panthers bee on March 1, I was like, ‘We have to embrace the journey.’ But then, when I found out what led me to look into the data, there were so many other kids in same position, eighth-graders who missed their chance.”
What to do?
The answer, said Good, is for Wake County to find its own sponsor.
Representatives from Wake and Panther bees have not yet responded to The N&O.
Holden Good has his own idea:
Scripps could invite “ambassador” spellers who have competed at the national level in years past, provided they pass a test or do volunteer work.
Anything to get more of them up there on stage, remembering that dysbarism has a “B” and a “Y” after endless hours of study.
This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 12:44 PM.