NATIONAL SPELLING BEE Local champ takes her talent to D.C.

Kelly Morckel will compete for the national Spelling Bee title this week.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- When she competes in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee this week, Kelly Morckel will be drawing upon an unusually broad spectrum of talents and interests to help her meet the challenge.
Kelly, 14, an eighth-grader at West Branch Junior High School, won The Vindicator Regional Spelling Bee by correctly spelling ibuprofen March 15.
She will be among about 250 contestants in the national bee Wednesday and Thursday in Washington, D.C. Final rounds will be televised live on ESPN. Kelly is the first West Branch student to win The Vindicator spelling bee in its 70-year history.
"I want to be determined and optimistic, but not too optimistic. I'll just try to be upbeat," Kelly said. "I know I'll be a little bit nervous. I hope I get the first word right. I'm just hoping that I can do my best and not be upset with what I did or didn't do," she added.
"I'm not going to overdo it. I'm not going to study so much that I'm totally fried. I'm not going to stress myself out over it," Kelly said, adding that she's trying to eat a healthy diet and get plenty of sleep in the days immediately before the competition to achieve her top performance.
Kelly's bio
A daughter of Dale Morckel and Jodi McCullough, both teachers, Kelly resides on a 57-acre Goshen Township soybean and corn farm and enjoys gardening, reading, writing and volleyball. She maintains her own herb garden. A poem she wrote, titled, "Rain," tied for first place in state Power of the Pen competition.
"Writing is important to me because it lets me express myself and get all this energy out. I have these thoughts that I just want to put down somewhere, and it helps me do that," said Kelly, who will write an Up Next page column for The Vindicator concerning her national spelling bee experience.
To Kelly, writing and spelling ability are inextricably linked, even in the age of computers and spell check.
"When you're writing, you want to have word confidence that you know how to spell it and you know what it means," she explained.
"I think it's important to know how to spell and not rely on a machine to do it for you, because machines can break down and the machine doesn't really know anything except what you program into it," she added.
To prepare for the national competition, Kelly said she has been reviewing the national spelling word list and reading classic literature. Her mother has been reading words from the list for her to spell aloud.
At school, Kelly is enrolled in the gifted student program, and language arts is her best subject. If she could speak with President Bush and Congressional leaders, the first item she'd discuss would be the loss of American farmland.
A voracious reader who enjoys classic novels, she rates "Wuthering Heights" as her favorite book, "Pocahontas" as her favorite movie, and Christian contemporary as her favorite kind of music, and names landscape architecture as a potential career.
"I don't know what I'd like to do. I have so many interests that I can't decide on anything. I keep changing my mind," she said. "I want to have a job that I enjoy and that I don't mind going to every day."
Extracurricular
A member of her school's track team, she placed second in the 400-meter dash in a countywide track meet last week. She recently appeared in the school play, "Hansel and Gretel," and is also a school choir soloist and band member, playing a wide variety of instruments, including flute, piccolo, oboe, saxophone and piano.
What does it take to be a good speller? "It takes interest in words and English in general. It takes reading a lot and determination, confidence, not overconfidence," she concluded.
"She doesn't have to win the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee for us to be very proud of her. We're very proud of our Vindicator representative. We're very proud of the kind of student she is, and however she does, we'll remain proud of that," said Helen Paes, Vindicator community affairs director.