The Scoop

Spelling Bee Winner Who Holds 3 Basketball World Records Thanks Bill Murray For Win

By • July 9, 2021 7:51 pm

Fourteen-year old Zaila Avant-garde, an eighth-grader from Harvey, Louisiana, was named the winner of the renowned competition — and $50,000.

“It made me feel really proud,” she said after winning. 

“I’m really hoping lots of little brown girls all over the world and stuff are really motivated to try out spelling and stuff because it’s really a fun thing to do and it’s a great way to kind of connect yourself with education, which is super important,” she added.

Avant-garde won the competition with the word “murraya,” a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian plants, and celebrated with a confetti swirl onstage. But not before she managed to make the judges laugh with a Bill Murray joke.

“She told NPR she’d ‘like to say thank you to Bill Murray,’ explaining she used to listen to the soundtrack to his film Lost in Translation, and ‘that’s how that word was stuck in my head because it was spelled like Bill Murray’s name,” The Week reported.

The recent victory marks the resumption of the yearly competition, which was postponed 

because of the pandemic last year. In 2019, Zaila participated but did not get to the finals.

Three Guinness World Record titles

But aside from being hailed the national spelling champ, Zaila also holds other titles to her name like the three Guinness World Records for her basketball talents: she has the most bounced juggles per minute with four balls, the most basketball bounces in  half a minute with four balls, and also ties the record for most basketballs dribbled at once — six — by one person.

Zaila was one of 11 finalists from a pool of 209 competitors ranging in age from nine to fifteen years old. Preliminaries kicked off the competition in June, followed by quarterfinals and semifinals. The final round was held in person at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, on Thursday night.

Reports noted how this year’s competition was intense, with new rules that raised the bar. To assess vocabulary, each level featured an additional “word meaning” round for example and a “spell-off” threat hung over the finals.

In previous years, ties usually occur  — like a record of eight spellers — winning in 2019, this year, a new rule stated that spellers who remained at the end of the allocated time had 90 seconds to spell as many words as they could from a predefined spell-off list.

Steeve Strange

Steeve is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Scoop.
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