Shenali DeSilva is spelling out the family name, and she hopes to spell her way to Washington, D.C.

Shenali will compete in the Southeast Minnesota Final Spelling Bee Tuesday, going up against the 12 top spellers at the Wood Lake Meeting Center in Rochester. If she wins first place, she will advance to Washington, D.C., to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee at the end of May.

“I’ve done this for two years but it’s still really exciting,” Shenali said. “But there’s a lot — a lot — more pressure this year than the last two years.”

Shenali, 13, is now in eighth grade, which means this is the last year she will be able to compete in this particular spelling bee. She isn’t alone in her two hours of training each night, though. Helping her go over the 1,200 word list, along with studying etymologies, Latin, Greek, French, Middle English and more, is her brother, Shane. He won the Minnesota Final Spelling Bee in 2014 and went on to Washington, D.C., when he was an eighth-grader. But his spelling didn’t just affect his own future.

“It started mostly because my brother did it since he was in fifth grade, so I would always watch him and see how big of a deal it was, and that’s why I wanted to start,” Shenali said, explaining how she started. “And also, my mom and me always just talked about it as though I was going to do it. It wasn’t really a choice, I just always wanted to do it.”

Shenali’s father, Sam, said his daughter is a bit luckier than Shane as she has a lot of coaching from her older brother.

“There’s quite a bit of technique and stuff that goes into it,” Sam explained. “At the time [Shane] was in, he had to figure a lot of things out himself. So now she basically gets coaching from everyone and all the stuff has been refined so she actually is in a better state when she’s going into the finals than he was.”

He said his daughter is a natural speller, and her love for reading doesn’t hurt the cause.

“The bad thing to be hanging out with two spellers, you get corrected a lot,” he laughed.

Shenali hopes to win both for herself and to “uphold the family name” so to speak. She explained she didn’t realize how it felt to be in the spotlight, but she learned fast.

“It’s overwhelming but it feels pretty good,” she said. “But there’s like, a lot of pressure from a lot of places.”

“I go to Pacelli [Catholic Schools] so it’s pretty small, so everyone knows who you are, everyone knows the achievements you’ve made so far,” she added. “So it’s like a ton of pressure.”

Despite the pressure, she has a large support group behind her, including family and friends. With 23 classmates — all very close — there are many fans who are willing to keep pushing her to do her best and help her when she gets tired out.

“As soon as I won my school [spelling bee] they all jumped up on stage before they even said that I won,” she said. “As soon as they said ‘That word is correct,’ they all jumped on stage and gave me a hug.”

Shenali has reason to get tired at times, as she has her fingers in a little bit of everything. Besides spending time every night studying for the spelling bee since mid December — only missing two or three nights since then — she is involved in sports, painting, is “high tech in nature” as Sam put it, and is working to get an Access Scholarship from the Chamber of Commerce.

“So it’s kind of tiring getting this worked into the schedule,” Sam said.

Though Shenali has worked through the tiredness and pressure, she admitted she was a bit relieved that she will be too old to compete next year.

“I enjoy doing the words but of course it is extremely tiring with school and everything else that I have — all my sports and stuff — it’s pretty difficult,” she said. “But I’m almost there so it’s just kind of, I’m almost there. So that’s what’s pushing me to the end I guess.”