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by
MARK BECHTEL
Photograph by
JEFFERY A. SALTER
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ZAILA
AVANT-GA R DE
African American champion. She received congratulatory
tweets from Jill Biden and Barack Obama, and a shout-out
from LeBron James. Not bad for something she considers
a hobby. As Zaila says, “My main thing is basketball.”
Zaila started playing hoops when she was 5. She would
practice her ballhandling by dribbling three balls at once
(often while listening to an audiobook) and over time
added more. She has set four Guinness world records—
including one for dribbling six balls at once—but she’s
not just a novelty artist. Zaila, who is homeschooled, is
a serious prospect as a point guard.
She’d like to play in the WNBA, but if that doesn’t hap-
pen Zaila has her eye on something more cosmic. After
winning the bee she was invited to tour NASA’s Johnson
Space Center, a place she could see herself working. “I’d
like to figure out how to help humans and other animals
kind of do the Star Wars thing—without all the monsters
and Darth Vader,” Zaila says. “Help settle other planets,
doing lunar habitats and stuff. I really feel like we are all
animals on Earth. It’s an expanding species, so I feel like
the natural, next place to expand to is off of Earth.”
WHEN HIS DAUGHTER
Zaila was around 3 years old, Jawara
Spacetime changed her last name to
Avant-garde to honor saxophonist John
Coltrane, who embraced avant-garde
jazz in the mid-1960s. “There was some
pretty big backlash to what Coltrane
was doing,” Jawara says. “It ’s just noise.
But he loved that music. For my kids,
I wanted them to be able to persevere
and do what they love. Live your life to the fullest—and
be passionate about whatever you’re doing.”
Now 14, Zaila has certainly embraced a wide range of
passions. Such as spelling: She won the Scripps National
Spelling Bee this summer. And basketball: She has set
multiple world records for dribbling and is an elite-level
player. Zaila can also ride a unicycle and juggle—at the
same time. For her myriad talents, the ninth-grader from
Harvey, La., is our 2021 SportsKid of the Year.
Zaila began spelling competitively only in 2019, but she
had been building her vocabulary while reading more than
1,000 books. “I’d be like, ‘What’s this word?’ ” she says. “So
I’d go to look it up in the dictionary. And you know how
they have like the links that lead you to the next word? That
was my downfall. Suddenly a quick run to the dictionary
turns into diving through whole histories of countries.”
In July she outlasted 10 other finalists—winning on
Murraya, a type of tropical tree—to become the first
How do you spell success? This 14-year-old
WORLD-RECORD HOLDER can tell you. She
can also tell you how to spell solidungulate.
And dribble circles around you. On a unicycle
SPORTSKID OF THE YEAR