“Rutabaga. R — U —”

Alex Hegyi ‘08 had not planned to be here. To make it this far. He hadn’t practiced, he hadn’t prepared, really, beyond maybe looking over the email of practice words. Now, here he was. Behind him, his teammate, Sev Guardado’09. Before him, a sea of white chairs, filled with people — parents and students, performers and already-eliminated competitors — waiting, watching. Watching him, standing behind the microphone.

“T — A —”

Team Mariachi, as the MCs dubbed it, did not appear at Old Union Saturday night with designs on first place in the Project Read Spelling Bee. In fact, Team Mariachi had little to no spelling bee experience. They were a pair of musicians, one a physics major and one a psychology major, who wanted to reach out to the community and help a good cause. That was why Alex and Sev were here, in this ballroom, facing all these people—Charity.

Project Read, a student organization in its infancy and young in both focus and history, was recognized by the Office of Student Affairs only this month. The group is devoted to promoting youth literacy in developing countries, particularly India, by setting up school libraries.

“Our goal,” said Natasha Pereira ‘08, a founder and co-president of Project Read, “is to improve the access of traditionally disadvantaged groups, like girls and lower income students, by providing them with educational materials.”

In India, 17.8 percent of all schools have fewer than 100 books available to students. Project Read is committed to sending at least 500 non-school related books to each library it supports.

The proceeds from the spelling bee, the first incarnation of what the group hopes will become an annual event, will go to obtaining and shipping books to four different sites in India. Eight Stanford students will also have the opportunity to volunteer at those sites this summer, leading English language programs and helping organize free lending libraries. Since the goal of the competition was simply to raise money, the organizers didn’t worry about having some students compete solo and others compete in teams.

“Most of the libraries we’re setting up are for children,” explained Sarah Loaiza ‘09, the group’s event coordinator. Thus, the decision to recreate the atmosphere of the ubiquitous elementary school spelling competition.

“B — A —”

Alex and Sev were two of 10 contestants in the bee. Their competitors were Sarah Arora ‘08; Peter Ahn ‘08, representing Stanford’s competitive cheer squad; Hershey Avula ‘08, the ASSU President; Sunil Parekh ‘08, from Raagapella; Claudia Skieller ‘08 and Scott Bland ‘10 from the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band, who together made “Team Band”; Pereira; and Calley Means ‘08, president of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity.

The Stanford Tree watched over ticket sales outside the ballroom; a cappella groups Fleet Street and Mixed Company performed between rounds of intense — and amusing — spelling challenges. And for almost a full hour, contestants stood at the microphone, only six or seven feet from the first row of the audience, chuckling and frowning their way through words from barista to distillate, statutory to brassiere to phlegmatic.

The narrowing of the field was swift and brutal. In this single-elimination competition, a single misspelling, affirmed by the striking of a gong by the official judge, Nobel Laureate and Physics Prof. Douglas Osheroff, was enough to end any competitor’s dreams of orthographic glory.

At the end of the first round, all 10 contestants remained; by the end of the second round, there were eight. By the end of the third, only Team Mariachi, Hershey Avula and Sarah Arora were left on stage. Confronted by the polysyllabic challenge of “luminescence,” Sev and Alex shed their mariachi jackets in distress, but in the semifinal round it was Sarah Arora, confounded by the word “epochal,” who left the stage, smiling and waving amidst the echoes of the gong.

To the very end, the spellers were categorically modest.

“After ‘tiramisu,’” Hershey admitted to the crowd, “I thought it was over.” Despite his dearth of confidence, Hershey came up against Team Mariachi in the final round of competition.

It was there, in the finals, that Hershey’s misspelling of “maraschino” brought Team Mariachi within sight of spelling bee triumph. As per typical bee rules, in the final round, Team Mariachi would have to spell first the word Hershey had missed, then another word, to earn the title of champion. “Maraschino” did not prove a problem for the dynamic duo. But “rutabaga”?

By now, the room was silent. This one final word stood between Team Mariachi and victory. Only a couple letters to go. The tension was palpable. The gong was within reach.

“G — A.”

And they’d done it. A hoot and a holler, a rousing round of applause, some scattered laughter and shaken hands, and Alex and Sev were the first ever Project Read Spelling Bee champions.

“I can’t believe it,” Alex said afterward, surrounded by family — it was, after all, Parents’ Weekend — and supporters. “It was totally unexpected.”

The prize for spelling prowess, in this case, was no elaborate trophy or grand fame. Instead, the winners derived their reward from the size and support of the audience, from the satisfaction of a job well done.

“I feel great,” Sev exclaimed. “And we were able to raise money for charity.”