Meet the Sacramento-area students competing in this year’s National Spelling Bee

Two Sacramento-area students are among the 243 young competitors in the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee — celebrating its 100th anniversary — and have advanced past the first two rounds of the prestigious contest being held this week near Washington, D.C.

Shruthi Srinivasan, a sixth-grader at Rocklin Academy, and Ryan Sekera, a fifth-grader at Ridgeview Elementary School in Granite Bay, both spelled and defined their way through Tuesday’s preliminary rounds without error. The pair qualified through a regional competition sponsored by the Terrell Christopher Gladney Memorial Academy in Sacramento, which organized the capital region’s competition in March.

Shruthi correctly spelled “mandragora” — an alternate noun for the root of a mandrake — and identified clover as a plant in the vocabulary round. Ryan spelled “Jahiliya” — a noun describing the pre-Islamic period in Arabia — and defined resilience as “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”

Both will take on the challenging 40-question written exam Tuesday evening for Round 3.

The competition continues with Wednesday’s quarterfinals. Shruthi and Ryan advanced along with 181 other competitors from across the nation, including 18 other California contestants. Competitors also hail from the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Department of Defense Schools in Europe, according to the organizers.

The winner, who will be crowned on Thursday, will receive $52,500 in cash and other prizes.

Shruthi, 12, and Ryan, 10, are part of a diverse field of spellers ranging in age from 8 to 14. Both students balance academic excellence with a range of extracurricular interests, according to their profiles. Shruthi enjoys biking, singing and playing the piano and clarinet, while Ryan spends time coding, playing sports and solving Rubik’s Cubes.

Broadcast and streaming coverage of the bee in Oxon Hill, Maryland, is provided by Cincinnati-based Scripps, which has sponsored the event for a century.

The quarterfinals will be broadcast and streamed Wednesday on Bounce XL between 5 and 9:45 a.m. Pacific, followed by a tape-delayed semifinals on Ion (KSPX-TV, ch. 29) from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Pacific.

The finals will be broadcast live Thursday on Ion from 5 to 7 p.m. Pacific.

Live coverage can be found at spellingbee.com.

Update: Shruthi was eliminated in the fifth round Wednesday, incorrectly defining dross; Ryan was eliminated in the seventh round Wednesday when he misspelled cribellum.

This story was originally published May 27, 2025 at 2:19 PM.