Basketballs, Books, and a Historic Bee
The word was "murraya." It is a genus of tropical trees belonging to the citrus family, and on a Thursday evening in July 2021, it fell to a twelve-year-old girl from Harvey, Louisiana, to spell it correctly in front of a national television audience and claim the Scripps National Spelling Bee championship. Zaila Avant-garde stepped to the microphone at ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, took a breath, and spelled the word without hesitation. The crowd erupted. She thrust both fists in the air and jumped. In that moment she became the first Black American champion in the ninety-three-year history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee — and she was twelve years old.
Zaila was born on August 24, 2008, and grew up in Harvey, a suburban community across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Her father, Jawara Spacetime, introduced her to basketball before she started school, and Zaila took to it with a focus and physical discipline unusual in any child. By the time she was eight, she was not merely playing basketball — she was training for records. In 2017, at age nine, she broke the Guinness World Record for the most basketball bounces in one minute using four balls simultaneously. She would go on to hold three separate Guinness records in basketball dribbling skills, a fact that makes her curriculum vitae essentially unique among thirteen-year-olds.
The spelling came later, and when it came, it came with the same intensity she brought to sport. Zaila began preparing seriously for competitive spelling around age ten, using wordlists, etymology study, and the kind of methodical drilling that spelling bee champions describe as closer to athletic training than to academic study. She entered the Scripps competition in 2021 as one of the favorites, a veteran of regional competitions who had already demonstrated that she could withstand the particular psychological pressure of a live, televised, elimination-format contest.
"Being the first Black winner in this competition — I feel like it shows how Black people, or Black kids especially, can do anything they put their minds to, and I hope it inspires them to do lots of great things." — Zaila Avant-garde, July 2021
The 2021 Scripps Bee was held after a year's postponement due to the pandemic, and the field was among the strongest in the event's history. Zaila moved through rounds with controlled precision, spelling words drawn from Sanskrit, Arabic, French, and classical Latin roots — the etymological range that defines elite spelling bee competition. In the final rounds she defeated a field of competitors who had also spent years preparing, and she did it with a composure that the commentators repeatedly noted. When it was over she became not just a champion but a symbol.
The significance of her victory was not lost on anyone paying attention. Ninety-three years is the entire modern era of the Spelling Bee. Across that vast span of time, covering the entirety of the civil rights movement and every subsequent decade of American social change, no Black American child had won the national championship. Zaila's victory broke a barrier whose existence most people had not consciously articulated, but which everyone felt immediately when the barrier fell.
"I have a lot of inspiration. Steph Curry, Kobe, LeBron — but also just the idea that you can get better at anything if you work hard enough." — Zaila Avant-garde
After the Bee, Zaila appeared on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where she demonstrated her basketball skills for a national audience, dribbling multiple balls with casual fluency while fielding questions about words and her plans. The clip went viral immediately, encapsulating in a few minutes everything that makes her story so unusual: the combination of physical excellence and intellectual mastery, the cheerful confidence, the sense that this young person had not yet reached any ceiling in any domain she had chosen to inhabit. She was thirteen. The future, by any reasonable assessment, was wide open.