Schools and sponsors have dropped out of the bee pipeline, regions have been consolidated and the bee has fewer than half the spellers it had three years ago.
“Many of our sponsors who are still with us, even, have expressed the concerns and the challenges brought forth by the pandemic,” said J. Michael Durnil, the bee's executive director. “Some of our sponsors realigned what their missions were and maybe the bee didn't fit. Maybe they lost person power and had to rethink their core business and the bee was not part of it. There's been a great reset in a lot of areas.
Pro sports franchises have filled the sponsor void. The NFL's Carolina Panthers host a massive regional bee that sends four spellers from North Carolina and two from South Carolina. The Tennessee Titans do the same for most of their state. And Scripps ran five of its own regional bees for kids who lived in places with no sponsor.
But in 2019, more than half of the 562 spellers in the bee were wild cards, many of them younger kids who weren't competitive at the national level. Scripps had planned to scale back the program in 2020. Then the bee's longtime executive director departed and her replacement, Durnil, scrapped the wild cards altogether.
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