Seipel ‘hypnotic’ in spelling bee win
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Abigail Seipel, center left holding plaque, and Johanne Schommer, center right holding plaque, were the winner and runner-up of Wednesday’s Maryville Middle School Spelling Bee. Other contestants, pictured from left, included Lucas Klotz, Keegan McNeely, Jewl Galapin, Mercedes Gilliland, Cassidy Kline, Blake Springer, Noel Hardin, Tyler Marriott, and Truett Haer.
With last year’s champion, Hayden Mildward, looking on from the audience, Maryville Middle School crowned a new spelling champion Wednesday afternoon.
After 15 rounds, plus a brief championship round between the remaining two of 11 starting contestants, fifth-grader Abigail Seipel correctly spelled “hypnotic” after her sixth-grade classmate Johanne Schommer stumbled over “migraine” to clinch the win at this year’s MMS Spelling Bee.
More than half the students entered in the 2016 contest lasted through the tenth round, when a half-dozen students remained on the commons area stage. But then Lucas Klotz put an “e” in “origin,” and Cassidy Kline went astray with an incorrect spelling of “parable.”
A few minutes later, the final four became the final three when Mercedes Gilliland replaced a soft “c” with the letter “s” in “cyberspace, and Noel Hardin left the stage after misspelling “modular.”
That left Seipel and Schommer to finish the competition head to head.
With science teacher Chelli Green serving as pronouncer, the two girls worked their way through an increasingly difficult battery of words that included such entries as “genteel,” “pastoral,” “enunciate,” “mogul,” “personnel,” “marathon,” “pomposity,” and “collude.”
As winner and runner-up, Seipel and Schommer will compete at the county bee next month at West Nodaway R-I School in Burlington Junction. The winner there will move on to regional completion in St. Joseph and a shot at traveling to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
Seipel is the daughter of Neneth Seipel of rural Maryville, and Schommer is the daughter of Becky Wynne and Mike Schommer of Maryville.
A trip to the nation’s capital is not out of the question for either girl, since Maryville Middle School students have qualified for the national contest in two out of the last four years. Mildward, now a freshman at Maryville High School, qualified as last year’s northwest Missouri regional winner. Sakif Islam, then an MMS sixth-grader, won the regional title in 2013.
Other students participating in Wednesday’s MMS bee included: fifth grader Jewl Galapin, Truett Haer, and Cassidy Kline; sixth graders Mercedes Gilliland, Lucas Klotz, and Keegan McNeely; and seventh graders Noel Hardin, Tyler Marriott, and Blake Springer.
Spelling bee staff included eighth-grade reading teacher Jeanne Adwell, who served as coordinator; pronouncer Chelli Green; judges Diane Moore and Sandra Neal; and rules referee Erin Pierson.
