Bellefontaine Middle School eighth-grader Sloan Stolly, left, won the Logan County Spelling Bee Tuesday night, Jan. 16, at the Holland Theatre. Fellow BMS eighth-grader Caden Yoder is the runner-up. The traveling Logan County Spelling Bee trophy, which Sloan and Caden hold together, will return to their school this year. (EXAMINER PHOTO | MANDY LOEHR)
A head-to-head spelling duel capped off the 2024 Logan County Spelling Bee Tuesday evening, Jan. 16, at the Holland Theatre, where the final two spellers Sloan Stolly and Caden Yoder competed for approximately 16 rounds, until the bee finally concluded in round 30.
The talented Bellefontaine Middle School eighth-grade pair, who also were the top two contestants at last year’s county bee, have grown accustomed to competing against each other, noting that they have been playing soccer together since kindergarten, and they also both enjoy being in the same Algebra I class this year.
Sloan and Caden seemed to effortlessly breeze through audience-stumping words like “sphagnum” — a plant of a genus that comprises the peat mosses, and “dendrochronology,” — the science or technique of dating events, environmental change, and archaeological artifacts by using the characteristic patterns of annual growth rings in timber and tree trunks.
They kept the pace through other challenging words like “luciferin” and “senescent, ” “coccidiosis,” and even “Shaanxi,” a province in Northwestern China, and “Okefenokee,” a wetland in Georgia.
Once the bee reached round 26, host/pronouncer Erica Baer announced that the contest was going to switch to words on the “non-studied list” for contestants, an occurrence she remembers happening only a handful of times in the past.
The momentum continued through “spoilers,” “impish” and “bootleg,” and then in round 29, Caden was “hampered” by that very word. In a gratifying move, Sloan correctly spelled “rewarding” that round, and then continued to round 30 to clean up with her championship word, “laundry.”
“The jitters haven’t quite stopped,” admitted Sloan after the spelling bee ended. She was the 2023 Logan County Spelling Bee champion as well. “It went really well, but I was so nervous in the last few founds that I’d get a word that I didn’t know.”
She noted that she had been studying the spelling bee list since just before Thanksgiving break with her mom, Whitney. In addition to soccer, Sloan enjoys playing basketball and participating in track, and she also is a daughter of Josh Stolly.
Caden, a son of Colin and Carrie Yoder, said his dad quizzed him in the days leading up to the spelling bee at his school and right before the county bee.
“I really crammed the last several days and that seems to work well for me, to keep it all fresh in my mind,” he said.
The county bee, hosted by the Midwest Regional Educational Service Center, featured 12 total contestants this year, all of the top two spellers from the county school districts, Bellefontaine City, Indian Lake, Riverside and Benjamin Logan, in grades five through eight.
Prior to the lengthy concluding spelling duel between Caden and Sloan, five spellers were left at the start of round 13, including Benjamin Logan Middle School eighth-grader Autumn Cline, Indian Lake Middle School fifth-grader Calin Headings and Riverside Middle School seventh-grader Isabella Yelton.
The words “fens,” “Moirai” and “propitious” proved tricky for those three spellers in round 13.
Fellow competitors included Bellefontaine Intermediate School fifth-graders Garrett Gossard and Natalee Kuhns; Indian Lake Middle School sixth-grader Finn Ammons; Benjamin Logan Middle School sixth-grader Macie Marmon; Riverside Middle School eighth-grader Kyle Winfrey; and Riverside Elementary sixth-grader Sofia Butler and fifth-grader Eli Dunn.
Bellefontaine Intermediate fifth-grader Garrett Gossard carefully contemplates a word in the 2024 Logan County Spelling Bee Tuesday night on the Holland Theatre stage. (EXAMINER PHOTO | Mandy Loehr)
Logan County Spelling Bee participants this year included, from the left, first row: Sloan Stolly, Finn Ammons, Eli Dunn, Natalee Kuhns, Garrett Gossard and Calin Headings; and second row: Kyle Winfrey, Autumn Cline, Macie Marmon, Sofia Butler, Isabella Yelton and Caden Yoder. (EXAMINER PHOTO | Mandy Loehr)