It’s her spin, at last

Newport Beach resident Katie Nichols is nervous about seeing herself on television next week.

“I can’t believe I jumped up and down and hugged Pat Sajak so hard, and does the camera really add 10 pounds,” Nichols said.

Nichols, 25, realized her longtime dream of being a contestant on “Wheel of Fortune” in March. The episode is slated to air locally on KABC 7 at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

“You’re super nervous the whole time and you don’t know what to expect,” Nichols said. “You’re not sure what Pat is going to ask you and you’re trying to look at audience and think that you’re on national television.”

Contestants, including Nichols, will compete for trips to places like Malaysia and France on the show next week, which has the theme “Wheel Around the World.”

Nichols, who works in sales for the Huntington Beach-based surf-wear manufacturer Quiksilver, began watching Sajak and Vanna White as a 5-year-old growing up in Des Moines, Iowa.

“When that show came on, she and her brother would always come in the house — if their friends want to come or not,” said Nichols’ mother, Ardis Glace. “That was their time and they watched it just about every day. I could always hear them yelling at the television.”

Early on, Nichols discovered she had a knack for solving the word puzzles on the show.

“I remember it being on at my house and it was one of the only things to watch because we didn’t have cable,” Nichols said. “I loved to watch when I was learning to read — I could always get the puzzles really fast, that would be easy for me.”

Glace and her husband, Nichols’ father, Jay Nichols, both flew to Newport Beach in March to see their daughter compete on the show, which is filmed in Culver City.

Nichols, who signed up to compete on the show soon after she moved to Southern California a few years ago, only had 48 hours notice that she had been chosen as a contestant before the taping. She called her parents and they flew in from Iowa the next day.

“Out here, everyone knows somebody who has been on TV, but there, it’s a bigger deal,” Nichols said.

Her upcoming television appearance is the talk of the village in the small Kansas town where her grandparents live, she said.

Before the taping, contestants have to practice spinning the wheel and buzzing in their answers.

Nichols practiced spinning 30 or 40 times, because the show’s producers like the large, heavy device to spin a certain distance.

Nichols also expected the Wheel of Fortune set to be larger.

“The set is pretty small in real life,” she said. “On TV, it looks like this huge studio with a thousand people there, but it’s not.”

Like the set, Sajak also wasn’t as big as Nichols thought he would be.

“I thought he would be taller,” Nichols said. “But he’s super nice. He is really excited for you when you win. I really liked him a lot.”