Dev Shah, 14, the Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion, is enjoying his new celebrity status.
There was a big celebration for the Largo native in Pinellas County.
When he was in New York earlier this week, he made all the rounds on national talk shows, but he said he's so happy to be back home.
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"This bee has been going on for a long time. So just to know that I'm part of it means a lot. I think it's the longest-running program in America," Shah said.
Shah's spent a third of his life preparing for this. He started competing in spelling bees in the third grade.
He made it to the national finals twice before; he placed 51st in 2019 and 76th in 2021.
This year was his last time competing; 8th grade is the cut-off.
"I knew it was my last year. So I really devoted a lot of my time to spelling. Like I sometimes took days off from school," Shah said.
He spent hours studying, and no, contrary to what you might think, he didn't read the dictionary to get prepared.
"So spellpundit is one thing. I used spellpundit; you learn a set number of words and then you test yourself on them. So it's kind of like someone quizzing you. But it's just you doing it," Shah said.
But Shah wants to make it clear he didn't do this alone.
The entire Shah family was invested in his success. His dad, Deval, a software engineer, said they even hired coaches to get him ready.
"By fourth grade, his level was too high for me, too, for me to do anything. So my role and my wife's role was more like a supporting, supporting cast, as opposed to the main, so we just let the coaches handle and I was just handling giving him some tips strategy," Deval said.
His mother, Nilam, an internal medicine physician, focused on getting Shah emotionally and physically ready. Although Shah said it didn't really feel like a competition.
"So when you got to the competition, you sort of already knew a lot of the competitors," he said. "I've been doing spelling bees with them for like three years. So like, I knew most of them, and it was kind of like a reunion."
Shah said he hopes to be invited back to the national spelling bee next year as a commentator.
He said he's so grateful for the community that helped him that he's now planning to pay it forward.
He'll work with Bruhat Soma, the 11-year-old from New Tampa who was eliminated in the spelling bee's early rounds both last year and this year.
