I downloaded text data from http://public.spellingbee.com/public/results/2014/round_results and performed some text mining on the contestant interviews and came up with some interesting results. The hobby with the highest round average was Volunteering followed by Chess and Movies. I filtered for hobbies that occurred in at least 10 contestants and stopped at round 13. The reason that I stopped at round 13 was because there was a tie this year and the top two contestants went many rounds after 13. If I kept all the rounds in, the top hobby would be playing the Oboe, as both winners played the oboe.
Anyways, here are the results:
As a side note, I'll post the two R scripts to my git soon. (One script for web scraping, one script for analysis).