Cass Spinosa repeats as Love Creek spelling bee champion
After a grueling 27-round showdown, fifth-grader Cass Spinosa clinched the title of Love Creek Elementary spelling bee champion Jan. 22. It was the second consecutive year Cass won, allowing him to compete in an online regional qualifier.
The nearly hour-long bee was the longest that fifth-grade teacher and bee pronouncer Bridgette Perrotta has ever seen. She had to send a faculty member to retrieve her laptop during the 25th round to access the next list of words after going through all the ones in front of her.
“I apologize,” Perrotta said to the audience as she waited. “It’s never gone this far.”
Although the bee started with 12 spellers, the last 17 rounds were a back-and-forth battle between Spinosa and fifth-grader Muhammad Khan.
Cass misspelled “meddlesome” in the 12th round in what he and the crowd thought was a fatal mistake, but Muhammad’s consequent misspelling saved him.
The same thing happened several times more.
Finally, in the 27th round, Cass corrected runner-up Khan’s misspelling of neutralize before correctly spelling dignified – which he remained, as he tried to offer Muhammad a hug of consolation – to take the crown as students and parents in the audience erupted into applause.
“I just took my knowledge from last year, applied it here [and] tried to get myself not to be anxious,” Cass said. “Credits to my mom and my dad, who taught me to read and taught me things from a very young age.”
The top 40 qualifiers from the online regional qualifier will move on to the 2025 Scripps Regional Spelling Bee, which will take place Saturday, March 8, at the Delaware Tech Dover campus. The regional winner will progress to the national competition in Washington, D.C., in May.
The other Love Creek Spelling Bee competitors, along with their grade, included third-place finisher Juliana Lagonigro (fifth), Deacon Odenwelder (fourth), Ellie Tanikawa-Brown (fifth), Kendall Sager (fourth), Reeve Allmon (fifth), Gabrielle Getz (fourth), Daniel Kuhfahl (fifth), Carter Arvey (fourth), Gordon Deptula (fourth) and Lily Seifrit (fifth).
Ellen McIntyre is a reporter covering education and all things Dewey Beach. She graduated with a bachelor’s in journalism from the Penn State Schreyer Honors College in May 2024, after which she completed an internship writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In 2023, she traveled to New Zealand to cover the Women’s World Cup as a freelancer for the Associated Press and saw her work published by outlets like The Washington Post and FOX Sports. She also has a variety of other reporting experience, covering crime and courts, investigations, politics and the arts. As a Hockessin, Delaware, native, she’s happy to be back in her home state, though she enjoys traveling and learning about new cultures. She also loves live music, reading, hiking and spending time in nature.
