In Scrabble championship, students mind their Q's and Z's
The Scrabble team from Somerville had no uniforms, no school banner, no coach.
Instead, the team, two sixth-grade boys, entered a ballroom at the Boston Marriott Copley Hotel yesterday morning with their heads full of two-letter words and plenty of nerves.
Both soccer players, Sammy Evers, 11, and Pablo Espinola, 12, are accustomed to competition. But yesterday they traded their spikes for lettered tiles as their school's contestants in the National School Scrabble Championship.
The national competition, modeled after the spelling bee in Washington, D.C., started in Boston three years ago. Yesterday, it drew 184 students from grades 5-8 representing schools, libraries, churches, and community recreation departments from 20 states. The tension is palpable, the competition tough for the two-student teams.
''In sports, it's not only you. It's like a whole team," said Pablo, who awoke at 5 a.m. yesterday dreaming of W-Y-V-E-R-N-S, a word for dragon that he had learned the previous night. ''But now it's just me and Sammy. If we don't do well, we can't really blame it on other people."
Sammy and Pablo faced their first opponents -- two boys from The Sage School, a private school in Foxborough for academically gifted students. They were eighth-graders. They wore matching white T-shirts. And they had a coach, who sported a green team shirt.
Words like D-I-E-R-S, C-U-D-S, and K-E-X soon appeared on the spinning Scrabble board separating the teams. Roving referees in black-and-white-striped uniforms monitored the play on 50 tables. Above, the banners, quilts, and hand-drawn signs some of the teams had brought with them adorned the ballroom walls. Judges wearing red sashes paraded from row to row with dictionaries, occasionally ruling on players' challenges of their opponents' words. Parents and coaches photographed and videotaped their children from behind the velvet ropes along the sidelines.
Sammy folded his arms across the table, and Pablo rested his chin in his hands as the Sage School boys pulled ahead, finally winning with 326 points to 195. Sammy's and Pablo's mothers rushed up to them after the 50-minute round.
''Was it a close game?" one asked.
''Not really," said Sammy, shuffling his feet on the leaf-patterned carpet. ''They got the 'Z' and the 'Q,' " each worth the maximum 10 points.
Friends since kindergarten, the boys live five blocks from each other. Scrabble, a game their teachers at the Arthur D. Healey School introduced to them last year, brought the boys together as a team. Pablo finds the big words and Sammy makes sure they're spelled right. Neither excels in language arts, but both have memorized a bunch of two-letter words with obscure definitions.
''He's like the finder and I'm like the editor," said Sammy, who often decides where on the board to put the plastic letter tiles and maximize their points.
Teachers started using Scrabble to help students learn spelling, vocabulary, and math about a decade ago, said John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association. Students who previously relied on computers to check their spelling started reading the dictionary to build an arsenal of words, educators said.
Because much of Scrabble revolves around strategy -- placing the highest-scoring letters in just the right spots on the board -- students who are not stellar spellers can win as well, said Ben Greenwood, a former teacher from Lexington who directs the championship.
In round two, Pablo and Sammy faced off with two girls from Braintree -- an eighth-grader and a fifth-grader representing the Thayer Public Library. The players took turns drawing seven tiles. Pablo whispered into Sammy's ear with both hands covering his mouth.
''Oh, oh, oh!" Sammy said as he plopped down Z-I-T and counted aloud for 30 points. ''Yes! We already have more points in 10 turns than we did in our last game."
But when the boys later placed O-E on the board, their opponents objected. ''Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold," said Kirsten Shetler, 13. ''Challenge."
She called over a judge. He looked it up in his dictionary -- ''O-E: a whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands" -- and pronounced, ''This play is good."
Sammy and Pablo pumped their arms. The girls lost a turn. The boys eventually won, 317 to 225 points.
''You really know your two-letter words," Kirsten told them. ''I want to double shake on that because you guys did great."
Sammy later acknowledged that they had played two words they had made up, which is a legal move in Scrabble, as long as the opponent does not challenge.
Six hours later, the boys, who won three rounds and lost three, learned that they had placed 45th. A team from the Indian Hill Middle School in Cincinnati won the $5,000 first prize.
If they had won, Sammy and Pablo would have split the money 50-50. Pablo would have tried to buy World Cup soccer tickets.
And Sammy? ''I'd probably just brag about it and never spend it."
Tracy Jan can be reached at
tjan@globe.com. 
