For the second time in three years, Leland Public School is sending one of its students to the prestigious Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. – a budding dynasty made all the more notable by the fact that both of those students come from the same family.

Meet Minna Danziger, the Leland sixth-grader who, in March, secured a spot in the national competition by winning the 2025 Grand Traverse Regional Spelling Bee at the City Opera House. Her winning word? “Aikido,” a Japanese martial art focused on self-defense. Minna’s victory comes just two years after her older sister, Hazel, secured her own trip to Scripps by winning the local bee. The sisters are the first two students in Leland Public School history to compete at the national event.

Phoebe Danziger, Hazel and Minna’s mom, swears that she and her husband Jacob “didn’t purposefully set out to raise competitive spellers.” Now that they've done just that, though, the family dynasty narrative is absolutely taking root.

“[Hazel and Minna] also have two younger sisters who are eager for their turn once they’re old enough,” Phoebe says. Those sisters – fourth-grader Augusta, who is 10; and first-grader Ida, who is seven – are both also students at Leland Public School.

For now, though, it’s Minna’s time. Next week, she and her dad will head to D.C. for Scripps, which is set to take place from Tuesday, May 27 to Thursday, May 29. 243 spellers from across the nation, aged 8-14, will descend upon the nation’s capital for their chance to win a $50,000 grand prize and eternal glory in the annals of the legendary competition.

2025 is an extra special edition of Scripps, given that the spelling bee is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The first competition, held on June 17, 1925, featured just nine spellers. This year, Michigan alone is sending nine competitors – and seeking its first Scripps victory in 84 years.

Could the Danziger family be the ones who finally bring the Scripps Cup back to the Mitten? It will depend on how the words fall, but for now, the Danzigers are simply focusing on what they can control – namely, a whole lot of memorization. Each year, Scripps publishes an official study resource called Words of the Champions, which compiles thousands of words that might come up in the spelling bee, including a smaller list of 450 words that schools draw from for their qualifying bees.

While Words of the Champions doesn’t encompass every single word that will be called at the national competition next week – Phoebe and Jacob say that, at most, it can get spellers through the first round – it’s a good place to start.

“All the memorizing you can do can only get you so far in the national competition, but that’s still what Minna has been focusing on, is the word list for round one,” Jacob says.

Specifically, Minna says her goal is to be able to visualize whatever words come her way during the preliminary round at Scripps.

“I see all these words on paper while we’re studying them, so my process is about picturing the word and making sure it looks right,” Minna says. “Sometimes, thinking back to a certain time when I practiced the word can be helpful, too, because then I can say to myself, ‘I spelled that word right last week at home.’”

Not that studying and memorization alone could have gotten Minna to this point, anyway. To win the school spelling bee at Leland, she had to out-spell her final competitor, eighth-grader Levi Ulbrich, in an equally-matched battle that saw the two going back and forth for some 50 rounds of words.

“We ended up exhausting that entire 450-word list that Scripps provided,” says Joanna Aldridge, the middle school English teacher who coordinates the spelling bees at Leland. “From there, we move on to the dictionary, where our judge just randomly opens up the book, puts his finger on a word, and gives it to the students that way.”

Beyond studying up on big, hard-to-spell words – Minna says her current favorite is “Makgadikgadi Pans,” the proper-noun name for a series of salt pans in Botswana – Minna has another ace up her sleeve as she preps for next week: her big sister.

Now 16 and a sophomore in high school, Hazel’s trip to the national bee saw her correctly spell a difficult word in the preliminaries (“onychorrhexis, which means “longitudinal ridging and splitting of the nails,” per Merriam-Webster) before being eliminated from contention in a vocabulary round. According to the Scripps website, vocab rounds require each competitor “to orally select the correct multiple choice answer to a vocabulary question read by the pronouncer”; they were added to the competition in 2021 “to challenge the spellers and further advance the Bee’s focus on word knowledge and literacy.”

“I got out on a definition, which was too bad, because I felt super confident on my spelling and wish I’d gotten to do more spelling [at Scripps],” Hazel tells The Ticker. Now, as Hazel is helping Minna practice for nationals, the two are hammering not just spelling memorization, but also word definitions. “It’s been super fun, because a lot of the words are ones I remember studying two years ago,” Hazel says, adding that her deep knowledge of obscure words from her spelling bee days is proving invaluable now that she’s in the midst of SAT prep.

No matter what happens next week, Minna and the Danzigers can be assured of one thing: They’ve got a big community rooting for them back at Leland Public School.

“We’re going to do a big send-off assembly for Minna on Friday before she leaves, and then, if she’s competing when school is in session, we will all be watching on the big screen,” Aldridge says.

Pictured: Hazel Danziger at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2023 (left); Minna Danziger following her victory at the Grand Traverse Regional Spelling Bee earlier this year (right)