On May 26, Cooper Komatsu, tied for seventh place and advanced nine rounds at the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Maryland.

Cooper, an 8th grader at Culver City Middle School, competed against 284 spellers to begin with and correctly spelled challenging words in each round, such as buccal, cacomixl, glaucothoe, rerebrace, and myoclonus. (Go ahead and look them up in a dictionary, I won’t tell.)

Even though I’ve been a successful Culver City realtor for almost 30 years, with plenty of knowledge about selling homes in Culver City, as well as selling condos in Culver City, I can’t claim to have such advanced spelling knowledge.

Unfortunately, Cooper’s run came to a close in the ninth round, when he misspelled illicium, a genus of flowering plant.

At last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Cooper earned 11th place. A bit of trivia: Cooper Komatsu’s grandfather, Robert Rosenberg, competed in the same spelling bee when he was a young boy in 1955.

It’s no surprise that Cooper’s favorite board game is Scrabble. He’s so good at playing the game that he and his team {“Lucky 13”) placed 4th in the North American School Scrabble Championship, where they were up against dozens of teams from the US and Canada.

Also, his favorite subjects are social studies and math, plus he likes geography and traveling to new places.

I’ll stick to my role as a top Culver City realtor and let Cooper be the top speller.