Spelling Bee Champ Zaila Avant-garde Is A Basketball Wizard

14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde shows off her intelligence when she took home the trophy at the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night.

Zaila, who became the first African-American to win the annual spelling bee, exerted confidence on stage, often pressing pronouncer Jacques Bailly about questions of origin and roots before deciding on how she was going to go about spelling the word.

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While Zaila is obviously an incredibly talented kid, spelling is far from her only skill. A video is now surfacing of Zaila Avant-garde’s incredible handles on the basketball court.

#8thgrader #Middleschooler Zaila Avant-garde, ⚡️💨. pic.twitter.com/fyjKQI4rME

— Zaila Avant-garde (@ZailaAvantgarde) June 1, 2021

Zaila Avant-garde even owns three Guiness world records for dribbling basketballs simultaneously. Her love of basketball threatened her spelling career, but she’s happy she got back into it.

“I kind of thought I would never be into spelling again, but I’m also happy that I’m going to make a clean break from it,” Zaila said via NBC. “I can go out, like my Guinness world records, just leave it right there, and walk off.”

While most kids who win the Scripps National Spelling Bee start at a very young age, Zaila just started competing a few years ago. After being eliminated in the early rounds of the spelling bee in 2019, Zaila’s family hired 20-year-old Yale student, Cole Shafer-Ray, to give her private lessons. He was the runner up of the competition in 2015.

“Usually to be as good as Zaila, you have to be well-connected in the spelling community. You have to have been doing it for many years,” Shafer-Ray said. “It was like a mystery, like, ‘Is this person even real?’”

It sure looks like Zaila Avant-garde is an extremely talented kid with multiple different elite skills. The sky is the limit.

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