CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — When current Charlottesville Middle School student Justine Puri first made it to a school-wide spelling bee last year, the then-sixth grader at Walker Upper Elementary told Cville Right Now they didn’t do very well.

But that first experience provided them with motivation to study even harder, and this year, Puri not only won CMS’s schoolwide spelling bee, but emerged victorious in the division wide as well, and will now compete at the Scripps National Spelling Bee regional competition in Richmond on March 4.

Dorothy Carney, the gifted resource teacher at CMS, is in charge of facilitating the competition at the school, which begins each year with spelling bees in each of the English classes. The top two finishers from each class then move onto the schoolwide bee, which saw Puri face off against 40 other students in November.

Puri said they felt confident in their class’s spelling bee this year, as it was mostly stage fright that interfered with their performance in the schoolwide bee the prior year. But Puri once again qualified for the schoolwide spelling bee, aided in part by the comfort of competing in front of classmates they knew, but also by the practice they had done with their parents to prepare for this year.

“Me and my parents, we would spend like 20 minutes or more every night going over words, marking off which ones I got wrong and making sure I knew how to do them,” Puri said.

That preparation paid dividends in a competitive school-wide bee, which came down to Puri, two other students and five round of words that were not on the Scripps-made lists they had been studying in preparation for the competition.

“These were words they had never seen before,” Carney said, “and Justine two other students had five round where nobody missed any word.”

But when the other two finally stumbled, Puri was able to secure the win with two correct words in a row, the second winning word being “Ballistics.” Carney called the performance from all three finalists exciting and commendable, made all the more fascinating by the fact all three were seventh graders, as opposed to the previous year when an eighth grader had won. She said she believed the finalists were proud of that fact, which Puri agreed with.

Later, in the division-wide spelling bee, Puri won with the word “residuals,” while sixth grader Ollie Petralia from Walker Upper Elementary was the runner-up. Now, Puri will have just about three-and-a-half months to prepare for the next round, and they said they’ve been reviewing different roots of words with their mom in addition to Scripps’ list of words in preparation for the next round.

That leaves the question, what advice does the regional-bound Puri have for other students who may be looking to mount a spelling bee comeback of their own next year?

“Don’t give up,” they said. “Even if you fail, you just need to put as much as you can into it, and even if you don’t win or make it super far, as long as you tried hard and you studied for it, then you did as well as you could, and you should be proud of yourself.”