Stephen Briscoe, an 8th grader from Hanceville Middle School, won the 2023 Alabama Spelling Bee Saturday night.

HANCEVILLE — Hanceville Middle School student Stephen Briscoe will represent Cullman County Schools at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington after his win at the Alabama statewide competition on Saturday, March 18.

Briscoe said he had been diligently preparing for Saturday’s competition ever since he was named the winner of the Cullman County Spelling Bee last month. To do this, he said he would spend anywhere from two to four hours each night during the week reviewing the list of words given to each student before the competition.

He said his older sister, Samantha would often help him when she was available.

“It was kind of awesome to study with her,” Briscoe said. “We would just kind of mess around with each other.”

Eighth Grade Math and Science Teacher, Tiffany Benfield describes Briscoe as her “human spell checker” and consider’s herself lucky to have him in her first period class to “correct any of my spelling errors before any other classes can notice them.”

Benfield said Briscoe is “one of the most fascinating and brilliant” students she has encountered in her career and was happy to offer him encouragement when she would find him pouring over his list of words while on his way to — and on occasion during — his classes.

“The way his mind works is just so fascinating. It’s like you might have an idea where his head is at, but then it’s really in like twelve other places with him focusing on all these other things at the same time. You never really know what he is thinking,” Benfield said.

Briscoe used this to his advantage as a way to not become bored during Saturday’s nearly three hour long competition. Briscoe said he would use his time in between turns to “just think about what’s in his head.”

“Maybe I’m thinking about nachos with cheese on them. Or maybe I’m thinking ‘Man, I could have eaten those nachos I left at home,’ it’s just whatever I’m thinking at the moment,” Briscoe said.

Despite the amount of hours he spent preparing for the event, Briscoe said was caught off guard during Saturday’s competition when the proctor began going “off-list” and assigning words Briscoe had not prepared for.

“I didn’t know they were going to go off the list, so I couldn’t do anything about it. I just had to go with it.”

Fortunately for the 8th-grader, when he was given his winning word of “schnell” he recalled seeing the word while reading The Devil’s Arithmetic for an assignment from his English Teacher, Mark Sloan.

Briscoe is the second Cullman County Spelling Bee winner to advance to the national competition since 2019 when St. Paul’s Lutheran School student Carter Daily represented Cullman County and the first student to represent the County School District since Ray Crocker won the state competition in 1988.

Preliminaries for the National Spelling Bee are scheduled to begin on Tuesday, May 28 and conclude on Friday, June 1. Briscoe said he doesn’t have any immediate plans to alter his study regimen for the upcoming competition, but is looking forward to seeing the Capitol for the first time — at least that he is able to recall.

“I’m kind of excited to look around and see everything, because I don’t remember ever being there. I mean my parents say that I’ve been there before, but I don’t remember it,” Briscoe said.