TRAVERSE CITY -- Chris Rice took third place at last year's Grand Traverse Regional Spelling Bee when he misspelled "pinnacle" and watched another student correctly spell "basilica" to move on to the national competition.
Rice was faced with both words at the City Opera House Sunday, where he out-spelled 31 other students from Antrim, Charlevoix, Emmet, Grand Traverse, Leelanau and Kalkaska counties to win the 27th annual event.
For the second year in a row, the winning word was "basilica."
"Last year (Wyatt McDonnell) won on it and I thought 'here we go,'" said Rice, a sixth-grader at Cherryland Middle School in Elk Rapids. "I kind of had to think it out. I was just looking calm."
Fifth-grader Austin Wolfgram of Lakeland Elementary School in Antrim County was the youngest top-seven finisher. He placed second when he was eliminated with the word "aplomb."
"I am going to be happy I don't have to study anymore," he said.
"(Rice) is the young man he was up against in the county contest," Wolfgram' grandmother Dolores Gardiner said. "They were first and second in county and now they are first and second here."
Rice won an all-expenses paid trip to Washington D.C. where he will represent the region at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in May, an experience McDonnell said he won't soon forget.
"It was one of the best weeks of my life. You get to meet spellers from all over the world," said McDonnell, who served as the pronouncer of Sunday's competition. "There is so much to do in Washington D.C."
The Grand Traverse Regional Spelling Bee is sponsored by the Traverse City Record-Eagle. The top seven spellers honored at the regional competition include: Rice; Wolfgram; Magda Wasylewski, of Charlevoix County; Hanna Schaub, of Leelanau County; and Molly Franklin, Addey Meachum and Eric Fegan, of Grand Traverse County.
Rice, who studied with his mother for weeks before the contest, said "I had a gut feeling I might win,"
but added that a little bit of luck helped, too.
"There were a few words where I was lost and had to guess," he said.
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