WASHINGTON — Scott Remer, the country's only full-time professional coach for competitors in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, begins working with 34 students at the 2026 edition of the competition in Washington. The bee, which features 247 spellers, begins Tuesday and concludes Thursday.

Remer charges up to $180 for an hourlong private lesson and receives up to 10% of a speller's cash prize if the speller finishes in the top 10. He has coached five national champions and has worked with at least 29 spellers in each of the past four bees. Nearly every Scripps National Spelling Bee champion during the past 15 years has worked with a coach.

"This is really about the love of language and the love of the competition. Part of it is once you're stung by the bee, there's kind of no going back," Remer said.

Remer finished fourth in the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee, his final year as a speller. He graduated from Yale in 2016 and earned a master's degree from Cambridge University in 2017. His first study guide, "Words of Wisdom: Keys to Success in the Scripps National Spelling Bee," was published in 2010, the same year he coached his first champion, Anamika Veeramani. He has published three other books.

Born and raised in the Cleveland suburbs, Remer now lives in Mexico City. He has worked for the Council on Foreign Relations and as the communications coordinator for an LGBTQ-friendly synagogue in New York. Since 2020, he has worked full-time as a spelling coach and also offers tutoring in Chinese, Spanish, writing and standardized test preparation.

Remer drills his students on roots, language patterns and the exceptions to those patterns. "I try to be tough but fair, and I also try to modulate my teaching methods, based on the kids' needs and the kids' personalities," he said. "Whether I'm always successful at that is I guess an open question."

After one of his spellers won the title, Remer took home 7% of the champion's $52,500 prize, a bonus of $3,675. "I'm not going to deny that it pays well, because it does. But I don't know that there's anything wrong with that," he said.

Other coaches charge less. Navneeth Murali, a University of Pennsylvania student, charges roughly $50 for an hourlong lesson. "I found it prohibitively expensive," Murali said of higher-cost coaching. Grace Walters, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Kentucky who coached 2022 champion Harini Logan, charges $75 an hour and takes a small number of students each year.

During bee week, Remer gives lessons on-site and sits with spellers' families while television cameras roll. He emails lists of his students and sends updates on their progress, referring to them as his spellers even if they have multiple tutors. He has written an op-ed about the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the Guardian every year since 2019.

Scripps, the Cincinnati-based media company that has run the competition for a century, does not endorse coaching. "It's hard work, it's study ethic, it's perseverance," Corrie Loeffler, executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, said of what produces a champion.