For the first time young black woman wins spelling bee 0:46
(CNN) -
Zaila Avant-garde wasn't thinking about her place in history Thursday when she became the first black American teenager to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee after 93 editions of the contest.
Instead, he was thinking of Bill Murray.
The 14-year-old from New Orleans, Louisiana, won the 2021 crown after correctly spelling "murraya," a type of tree, which she associated with the famous comedian.
When she realized she had won, Zaila did a little turn and leapt into the air as confetti rained down from the sky.
"It felt really good to win because I've been working on it for two years. So winning all of this was like a dream come true," he told CNN's "New Day" on Friday.
"I felt like I was coming out of an unreal dream."
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To achieve this, the teenager had to fight her way through words like "querimonious," "solidungulate," and "Nepeta," which she claimed was the hardest word she had to spell in the competition.
"It would have been very hard if they had eliminated me at that point, because I would have felt awful, since I knew everything about the word except how to spell it exactly," he said.
The only black winner before her was Jody-Anne Maxwell, who represented Jamaica in 1998.
Zaila will receive a prize of US $ 50,000 in cash.
The National Spelling Bee started with 209 participants, ages 9-15, from five countries: the United States, Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, and Japan.
And 11 contestants made it to the final on Thursday night.
First Lady Jill Biden was on hand to cheer on the competitors at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort, Florida.
The event was canceled last year due to the pandemic, for the first time since World War II.
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Thursday night's victory is just one more in the champion's long list of accomplishments.
In addition to her crown in the spelling bee, Zaila was the holder of the Guinness World Records title for the most rebound juggling in one minute.
Zaila said she hopes to one day play basketball at Harvard before pursuing a career at NASA or as a coach in the NBA.
He also said that he could pursue neuroscience or gene editing.
Zaila has earned more than 14,000 followers on Instagram sharing her journey to the national spelling bee, as well as videos of her playing basketball, impressing her fans with her skills on the hoop.
The young woman said that she has a wide variety of interests and that she was looking for new challenges to face.
"I'll find something else to do," he said.
"Trust me".
CNN's Christina Maxouris contributed to this report.
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