Barrington Speller Makes Return Trip to Lake County Finals

This is getting to be old hat for Parnav Sivakumar.

The seventh grader will return to defend his 2011 Lake County Spelling Bee crown after qualifying Wednesday night as one of .

In contrast to previous years where one Sectional champ was crowned, this year four students from each of the three Lake County Sectionals advance to the Lake County Finals on March 14 at College of Lake County in Grayslake.

At South Park School, the rest of the quartet included Grace Chiou from St. Joseph's School in Libertyville, Pranav Guru from in Deerfield, and from in Lake Forest.

Sivakumar, Chiou and Guru were the first to qualify after the field shrank from its original 44 students to less than 10 after nine rounds of words lasting nearly three hours. Banta was the last to join them when he correctly spelled the word, qwerty, after Jonah Hirsch from Deerfield missed his word.

After winning last year's Lake County Spelling Bee as a sixth grader, was the only Illinois student to make the trip to the Scripps National Spelling Bee near Washington, D.C., where he placed among the top 30.

You wouldn't expect someone who has been on the national stage and won three of these spelling sectionals to be nervous, but Sivakumar said Wednesday night's field was tough.

"I was getting a bit nervous during this one because people were really well prepared," he said.

But if consistency counts for something, Sivakumar has stuck to pretty much the same regimen in preparing for these war of words.

"I mainly read from the dictionary and used the standard spellers list," he said. "I recognized some of the words they asked us tonight."

If there is an advantage to being a veteran of spelling bees, Sivakumar beams confidence when he says, "I knew what I was doing."