After finishing second last year in the state spelling bee, Jackson Parker said everyone expected him to win this time.
But in the 10th round of Saturday's competition -- in which he misspelled two words but was saved each time when his opponent misspelled the championship word -- Jackson's odds didn't look as good.
"I was a nervous wreck," his mother, Melanie Parker, said.
On the Donald W. Reynolds Auditorium stage at the University of Central Arkansas, the 14-year-old Jackson, one of the tallest children on stage, felt like he was going to have a heart attack.
Then he spelled "symplectic," a type of geometry, to advance to a championship word, the only contestant to do so that time.
After hearing retired Hendrix College professor David Larson pronounce "Mediterranean," Jackson's face relaxed.
"Mediterranean. M-E-D-I-T-E-R-R-A-N-E-A-N. Mediterranean," he said.
"Congratulations," Larson said, as Jackson's mom suddenly cried from a few rows back, breaking the audience's silence, and wiped her eyes with a tissue.
"He's always been a top-notch student," she said later.
After having words he didn't recognize that followed no apparent rules for how to spell them, he said, "finding one with Latin roots was good."
Jackson, an eighth-grader at Paragould Junior High School, will go to Washington, D.C., in May to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the finals of which are televised on ESPN.
The trip is paid for by the state bee host and sponsor, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Jackson also won a Kindle Fire HD, a Webster's Third New International Dictionary, a one-year subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica for kids, Merriam-Webster's College Dictionary 11th Edition for Kindle and a $100 Amazon gift card.
A.J. Navarro, a 12-year-old who attends Lakeside Intermediate School in Malvern, finished in second place after a spell-off. He won a Kindle Paperwhite, Merriam-Webster's College Dictionary 11th Edition for Kindle and a $50 Amazon gift card.
Emily Humphrey, a 13-year-old at Beebe Junior High School, finished in third place, winning a Kindle e-reader, Merriam-Webster's College Dictionary 11th Edition for Kindle and a $25 Amazon gift card.
This year's state bee had 57 spellers from as many counties and lasted more than three hours.
For spellers, a good finish at the bee often means hours of studying, sometimes every day.
Jackson's grandmother Paulette calls the words out to him -- she estimates about 600 a day -- and Jackson spells them back to her, sometimes writing them down.
"Practice, practice, practice," Paulette Parker said.
The pair also go over the language of origin and definition of the words, the two most important clues for Jackson as to how the words are spelled. Greek and Latin are the easiest languages of origin, he said.
Addie Jones, a top-six finisher, said she spent hours every week going over words with her mom, studying them at school and typing them on a computer.
Addie, a 10-year-old at Harrison Middle School, said she'll now fill up her days with reading instead.
"I really like to read," she said.
Addie was one of three spellers who tied for fourth place after the ninth round of spelling, in which only six of the 57 original competitors were left.
The 10th round featured the last three spellers and four cycles of words for each of them.
Jackson initially misspelled "kir" (spelling it "keer"), a French cocktail, leaving A.J. -- the only contestant to spell a word correctly that round -- to the championship word: cichlid, a type of fish. A.J., the champion speller from Garland County, was off by a letter.
The three spellers stood up, walked over to the front row of chairs on the stage, arranged themselves back to where they were and started over.
The same thing happened a second time: Jackson and Emily misspelled their words, and A.J. correctly spelled "realgar," a mineral. But he missed the championship word, "Tammany" (spelling it "tamani").
The third time, everyone spelled their words correctly: denotatum, hariolation, ergasia.
The fourth time, A.J. and Emily misspelled "cabotage," a domestic shipping route, and "thereology" -- therapeutics -- leaving Jackson with "symplectic," which he correctly spelled.
Then came the championship word.
"Everybody knows how to spell Mediterranean," he said later.
Metro on 03/01/2015