At age nine she began entering boat races off the Jersey shore, contests in which she maneuvers her Optimist through a course of markers, racing in circuits that range from a few hundred yards to a mile. Some of the races go with the wind—comparatively easy—and some are set up to go against the wind, requiring a sailor to rapidly zigzag to move across the water.
At age eleven, Kerry went to New York and competed in the Atlantic Coast Championships. “It was pretty hard,” she says. “Some days it was pretty heavy wind. I came in like 200th [out of 350], I did pretty poorly.” However, she notes, “It was a good experience.”
What Kerry fails to mention—that her mother volunteers—is that she has qualified for the U.S. national sailing team trials. Were she to make the team, she would be part of the crew that competes internationally, in South America and Europe. But she has elected not to try out. Sailing at that level would take too much time away from her real passion.
If her competitive spirit is evident on the basketball court and in her ocean racing, it’s in her spelling matches that she focuses like an athlete in the season’s final duel. Seeing her onstage, it’s clear she’s competing to win. There’s nothing casual about her approach, nothing thrown away. (In fact, not even her sailing is a distraction; during the summer she comes home after a day on the water and works on her spelling.)
She made it to her first regional bee at age nine…