For the past year, Faizan Zaki, 13, had a schedule that would rival that of professional athletes. He trained five to six hours a day on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends.
His reps were words. Lots and lots of words.
As last year’s runner-up, he is a favorite to win this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee. And he has never studied harder, he said confidently hours before he was set to take the stage Thursday evening.
The seasoned speller from Plano, Texas, was the only 2024 finalist who advanced to the 2025 finals.
“A lot of people are looking to me to beat what I got last year,” he said over the phone.
He took a bit of a different approach in preparing this year, to increase his speed and improve his vocabulary. Once he got home from school, he would open the dictionary and look for words he hadn’t seen before. He’d keep track of them in a document, focusing on the definition and spelling of each word.
This year, Faizan also studied specifically for the spell-off, the final tiebreaking round that cost him a win last year. In the spell-off, finalists have 90 seconds to spell as many words from a shared list of 30 as possible. Bruhat Soma defeated Faizan last year, spelling 29 words correctly to Faizan’s 20 words.
The spell-off was required to end the contest last year. This year, the rules have been amended so that the spell-off is optional if judges deem the contest has gone on for too long.
Still, Faizan wanted to be ready.
It’s the first year he has felt any external pressure, his mother, Arshia Quadri said as her son grabbed a snack. He becomes a little nervous before the competition, she said, but she is relieved the pressure hasn’t been overwhelming. (Ms. Quadri said she felt like she was holding her breath until the finals on Thursday night.)
Faizan has always loved learning. He started to read at 2, Ms. Quadri said, which she thought was simultaneously remarkable and not entirely significant. Then, at 3, he learned all of the countries of the world and their capitals, “which I have never known in my life,” she said, laughing.
By the time he was 4, people started telling Ms. Quadri and her husband, Zaki Anwar, about schools for gifted children.
Faizan first appeared at the Scripps National Spelling Bee when he was 7. (This year, the youngest competing speller is 8-year-old Zachary Teoh.)
Through the years, Faizan has formed friendships on the road with fellow elite spellers. He credits those friends for keeping him calm ahead of big events.
If he feels nervous, he tells himself: “I think you know this word. You can do it.”
“That gets me pumped,” he said.
He’ll have one more year of eligibility after Thursday night’s event. He also has a twin sister, Zara Jabeen, who has coached spellers but not competed. He said he may try to convince her to join him.
“Maybe I can get her into it,” he said.
Talya Minsberg is a Times reporter covering breaking and developing news.
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