Long Island spelling bee winner eliminated in first round of national finals
YY Liang, 12, of Hartsdale was eliminated from the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Oxon Hill, Maryland on Thursday. She is pictured the day before when she succesfully spelled her final word during the semifinals. Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin
YY Liang was defeated by “immanent.”
The word meant indwelling or inherent, and it stopped YY, 12, a home-schooled student from Westchester, from advancing to the second round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s finals Thursday night.
Leaving the stage to cheering applause, YY earned a tie for seventh place out of 245 spellers who began competing in National Harbor, Maryland, Tuesday.
“You have poise. You have determination. Not just in spelling,” head judge Mary Brooks addressed YY after she had misspelled the word. “This is your first appearance at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but we know you have skills that go far beyond this.”
“Keep doing everything that you're good at, whether it's tennis or spelling or whatever,” Brooks continued. “You're a champion. Congratulations.”
Bruhat Soma, 12, from Florida, won the championship after correctly spelling more words in a spell-off than Faizan Zaki, also 12, from Texas.
YY was the ScholarSkills/Scripps Long Island-Westchester Spelling Bee champion and two other students, both from Long Island, were also sent to the national contest. They were eliminated in preliminaries and quarterfinals earlier in the week.
By Wednesday night, YY was one of eight spellers who emerged as finalists after surviving days of competition totaling eight rounds in which spellers ages 8 through 15 tried to spell and decipher some of the hardest, most unusual words in dictionaries.
A normally calm person, YY said she would grow nervous as her turn neared. But once she approached the microphone, she said she would regain her calm. To keep her cool, she said in a previous interview that she would just let the moment pass.
A nationally ranked junior tennis player, YY said she didn’t see herself as competitive. Before Thursday, she said she did not expect to win the championship.
To her, the chance of her holding that trophy had seemed most unlikely.
“Unless I'm like the luckiest human alive, no,” she said, when asked about her odds before the finals. “That's essentially winning a lottery.”
While she didn’t win the top honor, YY, and other finalists, will take home a commemorative medal and thousands of dollars in prizes. For seventh place, the amount is $2,000. The champion takes home a trophy and $50,000 in cash, along with other prizes.
YY’s favorite subject is English but she’s also learning French. A child of Chinese immigrants, YY has also been learning Chinese.
The seventh grader has been home-schooled since the pandemic and didn’t return after her parents saw that she learns faster in this setting and that the flexible schedule allows her to play tennis more, said her father, Weiming Liang.
Another speller from the region, Victor Yang, 12, from Great Neck, failed to advance from the quarterfinals Wednesday. A third speller, Olivia Lipiec, 13, from Smithtown, was eliminated in preliminaries Tuesday.
Dandan Zou covers education for Newsday. Previously, she worked for a community newspaper in Maryland and a personal finance magazine in Washington, D.C.
