🇺🇸 Abhijay Kodali

The 2018 miss

His route to the national finals ran through the Dallas regional, where he had tied for first with Naysa Modi. At the 2018 national bee he placed third, going out on aalii, a four-letter Hawaiian word that is exactly the kind of trap the competition sets: short, unfamiliar and from a language whose spelling rules most spellers study last.

Third place at a national final is an outstanding result. It is also, for a competitor with years of eligibility left, an instruction: the gap between third and first in this competition is a year of study.

Naysa Modi, the speller he tied with in Dallas, went on to finish runner-up at the 2018 national bee. That gives the measure of the regional field he had come out of: one Texas contest produced two of the strongest spellers in the country that year.

Palama, and the eight-way finish

The 2019 final went 20 rounds over three days. The eight spellers left had beaten a field of 557 competitors aged seven to fifteen, and the officials could not remove any of them: every word put up was spelled correctly.

Scripps declared all eight champions. Kodali's word was palama. Each received 50,000 dollars and a Scripps Cup, and the pronouncer Jacques Bailly called the group "the most phenomenal assemblage of spellers in the history of this storied competition".

Twelve years old, in a field of fourteens

Kodali, from Flower Mound in Texas, was twelve, the youngest of the eight. Nearly all the others were thirteen or fourteen, in their last seasons of eligibility.

Age matters in the bee more than the leaderboard suggests. Spellers are eliminated by the calendar as well as by words, since eligibility ends after the eighth grade, and most champions win at the top of their range. Winning at twelve means arriving at the ceiling early.

The practical consequence is that a twelve-year-old champion has years of eligibility left and nothing to spend them on. The bee's rules bar former champions from returning, so a title at twelve closes the competition rather than opening it.

Where Abhijay Kodali is now

Not documented in the sources used for this page, which all date from the week of the 2019 final. His school, his studies and what he has done since are not established here.

The absence is consistent across the 2019 co-champions. The eight-way title was covered intensively for a few days, and the follow-up reporting that readers search for was never done, at least not in these sources.

Why the bee could not stop them

The Associated Press put the conclusion in its headline: the national bee had been too easy for the octet of champions. The Atlantic went further, describing eight middle schoolers toppling the competition itself.

The Washington Post's reporting that week identified the mechanism, an expanded field and a professional coaching industry that prepares children with the intensity of elite junior sport. Kodali's own record is a small illustration of it: an elimination on an obscure Hawaiian word in one year, and a share of the title in the next.

Coaching is the part of the story that makes adults uncomfortable, because it turns a contest of curious children into a trained sport. The counter-argument is visible in Kodali's own two years: what separated third place from a share of the title was another twelve months of systematic work.