Matthew Zeleznik started playing Scrabble when he was in the fourth grade. 

In those days, he would square off against his dad in a battle of vocabulary depth. It was not until years later when Matthew managed to defeat his father, and now, the high school junior has progressed to competing in challenging tournaments and at national Scrabble championships. 

Earlier this spring, Matthew competed in the 2017 North American School Scrabble Championship held at Gillette Stadium. He finished fourth, after falling to the eventual champion, North Carolina's Kevin Bowerman.

The experience has served as an inspiration for Matthew, who now plans to build his high school senior project around developing a middle school Scrabble team in Barrington. 

"I already spoke with Dr. (Andrew) Anderson," said Matthew, referring to the principal at Barrington Middle School. "He really liked the idea."

Matthew said there are many schools around the country that have Scrabble teams, and many of the boys and girls competing at nationals had been members of school teams. That likely provided those students a slight advantage as they prepared for competitions.

Matthew has taken a different route in preparing for Scrabble showdown — he hones his Scrabble skills through flash cards and memorization, and he has developed some key insights to playing and winning Scrabble. 

He started with memorizing all the two-letter words. In addition, he built a list of higher-scoring two-letter words, such as "qi" or "za."

Matthew also focused on creating parallel words — that is when a player adds letter tiles in a row along pre-existing words in order to capture more points. 

He studied all the three-letter words — there are about 1,000, he said — and then focused on studying the "hook letters." That is when a player adds a single letter tile in front of an already-played word, creating a new word and garnering more points.

There is also BINGO in Scrabble, which is when a player uses all seven letter tiles in a single word. BINGOs are worth extra points and can propel players ahead of their opponents. 

"I made flash cards for those," Matthew said. 

Matthew's enhanced interest in Scrabble blossomed a couple of years ago and continued to grow last year when he entered an open Scrabble tournament that was held at Stanford University in California. He traveled across the country with one of his parents and competed against mostly adults. Matthew managed to win a couple of matches and he fared even better at the School Scrabble Championship.

Competing against students in grades 9 through 12, Matthew won his first three matches and finished the first day of the tournament with a 4-2 record. His first loss came against Kevin Bowerman and, according to Matthew, could be traced to one single challenge.

Matthew said he was in the middle of the game when Bowerman announced a word he was playing, and Matthew thought he said one thing but it was actually another. Matthew challenged Bowerman and lost the challenge… and a turn. The one slip dropped him well-behind the eventual champion. 

He finished the tournament with a 6-3 record and was awarded fourth place as his point total margin of victory was greater than a number of other competitors who finished with the same record. 

Matthew, who also competes for the track team and baseball team at Barrington High School, said there are a number of benefits to playing Scrabble and hopes there is a large turnout of middle school students who are interested. 

Scrabble school team in the works

Do you know a Barrington Middle School student who might be interested in playing Scrabble competitively? Barrington High School junior Matthew Zeleznik is planning to start a Scrabble team at Barrington Middle School. There will be an informational meeting about the Scrabble team on June 6 at the Barrington Middle School cafeteria at 7 p.m. (There will be free pizza.) Anyone interested in the team can write to Matthew at barringtonscrabble@gmail.com