The Finest Bass Fishing in America Is Occurring on the Faculty Circuit

That’s a mark, Dylan Fogarty thought as he came tight to another smallmouth. After releasing the bass, the college senior saved the deep-water point on his GPS graph and fired off a text to his teammate, Hunter Fillmore, who was fishing on Kentucky Lake’s far north end. They were on a divide-and-conquer mission, and with a tournament just 36 hours away, the two fishermen representing Bethel University had plenty of water to cover.

As the afternoon wore on, Fogarty and Fillmore dialed in on a pattern. Pre-spawn smallies were staging offshore in the current, and they’d found bigger fish north of Paris, which lies just down the road from Bethel’s campus in McKenzie, Tennessee. The two knew having the home-court advantage wouldn’t be enough to carry a win — not when going up against hundreds of the nation’s top college anglers.

But they did get a morale boost that day in the form of John Garrett, a Bethel legend who graduated in 2019 after helping lead the team to back-to-back National Championships. Because while Fogarty, Fillmore, and the rest of the college teams were busy practice-fishing on April 15 this spring, Garrett was down in Florida clinching his first Bassmaster Elite Series win. After leading all three days on the Harris Chain of Lakes, Garrett became the second rookie this season to hold up the blue trophy.

“We’d been watching it live all day in our boats, so we came back to campus and everyone’s feeling confident,” Fogarty says. “Being able to watch guys like that, who were really my inspiration to fish in college, and seeing them compete at that high level. It just gives this extra confidence boost, like: Hey, maybe I can do this, too.”

It’s this optimistic and competitive spirit that’s fueled the steady growth of college bass fishing in recent years. There are now thousands of student anglers competing in the sport. Dynasties are being built, scholarships are on the table, and each tournament brings both the promise of a payday and the chance to make a name on a national stage. 

This week, 130 of the top-ranked two-man teams in the country will compete in the Bassmaster College National Championships on Lake Hartwell. The winning team there will automatically qualify for the head-to-head College Classic competition and a chance to fish the granddaddy of all bass fishing tournaments in 2025: the Bassmaster Classic.

As these college circuits have grown, attracting wide-eyed high-schoolers from around the country, they’ve become the ultimate proving grounds for professional bass fishing. Of course, getting a college degree is part of the draw and some student anglers don’t have aspirations to go pro after graduation. But most of these kids? They’re here to win.

Blast Off

It’s barely light out, and the marina at Paris Landing is lit up red and green by the hundreds of navigation lights reflecting off the water. Even standing on dry land near the docks, I can feel the big 250s rumbling underfoot. I recognize a few of the brightly-colored bass boats from gawking at them on trailers earlier: the ones with custom wraps, school logos, and the anglers’ names emblazoned on the sides. Most of these sparkly water rockets cost more than I’ll make in a year, and each kid behind the wheel is at least 10 years younger than I am.

As the Star-Spangled Banner plays over the loudspeakers, I’m surrounded by parents, siblings, girlfriends, and grandpas. A few coaches hold ball caps over their hearts, some beating faster than others. After a group prayer, the boats line up to idle past the dock for a safety check and then on past the channel marker. One after another in a randomly ordered line, their bows rise to the sky as they blast off into the main lake.

I watch as Fogarty and Fillmore pass by in a shiny red-and-black Vexus. They’re followed by a kid rocking a mullet, who’s running an 80s-era Bass Tracker with an old Johnson hanging off the back. Even as it seems out of place, it’s a reminder that under all the branded logos, the sponsorships, and the seriousness is a simple past time that’s supposed to be fun.

Somewhere in the middle of the pack is a University of Montevallo boat that was trailered up from Alabama. Onboard are Easton Fothergill and Nick Dumke, and even though nobody can see the targets, I know they’re there: two bullseyes on the back of their jerseys. The defending Team of the Year is poised for a three-peat after winning the last two tournaments they fished, and Fothergill’s still riding high from a top-20 finish at the Bassmaster Classic in March.

Putting along a few boats behind them is another pair of tall, clean-cut anglers from Montevallo, juniors Blair Erickson and Jackson Pontius. And while all four of the guys might be buddies on campus, the two juniors are just as eager as the rest of the pack to knock off Dumke and Fothergill. 

After making a short run to a shell bar just 500 yards from the marina, Pontius pulls out a rod rigged with a 3/16-ounce tube. He hooks a bass on his first cast.  

The Rise of College Bassin’

The tournament on Kentucky Lake marked the second stop on the Legends Trail of the 2024 Bassmaster College Series. Over the course of two days in mid-April, 216 two-man teams (a few fished solo) competed for the heaviest combined bags of five bass. And those bags weren’t light.

“When you talk about college fishing, you’re talking about the best young fishermen in the country. These young men and women are the future pros that we’ll be watching on TV,” BASS tournament manager Glenn Cale tells Outdoor Life. “You can see it in the Elite Series. I think seven of the nine guys who advanced last year were college anglers, and right now one of the guys leading the whole pack is Easton Fothergill.”

A former umpire in the MLB, Cale draws comparisons between today’s up-and-coming college anglers and the AA minor league ball players who are on their way to the big leagues.

“When you’re watching AA ball anywhere in this country, you’re watching the future big-league players,” he says. “That’s where the best baseball is played.”

Cale says that as the sport continues to grow at the college level, BASS is seeing a 15 to 20 percent uptick in applications every year from young anglers who want to compete. There’s also been an increase in the number of female competitors. This led the organization to expand its tournament series to a two-division format this year. Even then, Cale says, the divisions filled in a matter of minutes, with 1,000 anglers registering for the two tournament trails.  

And the BASS circuit, which formed in 2006, is just one of a few college fishing leagues in America today. After merging with Fishing League Worldwide in 2019, Major League Fishing has built up its own college league. This helped expand the sport beyond the Southeastern U.S., where BASS is rooted, and it opened the door for even more students to compete. (There are no rules against competing in multiple leagues, so many of today’s college teams fish more than one circuit.)

Importantly, these leagues aren’t recognized by the NCAA, so college fishing programs function as club sports. This means the anglers can seek out sponsors, and they can win money, gear, and other prizes in the tournaments. The first-place check for the Kentucky Lake tournament was just over $5,000, which isn’t exactly chump change but is a far cry from the Classic, which pays out $300,000 to the winner. 

Still, the pros who’ve been through the college wringer say these financial incentives are an important part of the experience. Because at the end of the day, pro bass fishing is a paper chase, and every professional angler is a small business unto themselves. 

“It’s just not financially savvy to chase fish around the country. Besides, what’s more important than catching fish in our industry is the business side of it,” says Elite Series pro John Garrett, who majored in business management at Bethel and runs a duck hunting outfit during the offseason. “Things like brand loyalty and learning how to sell yourself may seem super obvious, but you actually put them into play when you’re in college and fishing for a club.”

The money flows both ways, too. More viewers and fans mean more dollars for tournament organizers and the brands that sponsor them. Meanwhile, a handful of universities have capitalized on the sport’s growth by hiring full-time coaches and funding their own fishing programs. Bethel University started this trend when it hired Garry Mason, a career hunting and fishing guide and outdoor personality, as America’s first-ever college bass fishing coach. And in 2009, Mason established the country’s first scholarship program for the sport of bass fishing. He says the final piece came a few years later, when BASS launched the High School Series and created a recruiting pipeline for future college anglers.  

“At the beginning I just had to recruit kids from around the area whose fathers or grandfathers I knew, but I guess it worked out pretty well,” Mason tells Outdoor Life. “So 2011 and 2012 were really big years for us, and by the time we got to 2018, we kind of had the dream team of college fishing.”

The wins kept coming. And with more than a dozen national titles cementing its legacy, the relatively obscure school of fewer than 3,000 students has become a rip-lipping powerhouse. Mason says six Bethel alumni are now fishing professionally, with even more graduates holding jobs in the larger outdoor industry.

Other colleges — mostly smaller, private universities with money to burn — have followed suit, bringing on their own head coaches and devoting school funding to fishing programs. Today, at least 20 universities offer some form of academic scholarships for bass fishing. (A typical scholarship at Bethel will cover about a third of the overall tuition cost, which is more than $40,000 a year.)

These school-funded programs offer a major advantage in tournaments over traditional club teams, which are run and funded entirely by students. Universities like Bethel support student anglers financially by covering tournament costs and travel expenses, and they help connect those students with potential sponsors. Some schools even have wrapped trucks and team boats worth upwards of six figures.

These investments tend to pay off; eight of the 10 top-ranked teams in the Bassmaster College Bracket come from school-funded programs. But the real reward is the prestige these trophies bring back to campus. Schools like Bethel and Montevallo are now recruiting magnets for young outdoorsmen and -women. Mason says he’s heard from high schoolers in dozens of different states, and he even got an inquiry last year from a teenager in South Africa. Everyone is eager to get on the team.

Getting Schooled

Stopping at one of their known spots on day two of the tournament, Fogarty gets in position while Fillmore takes control of the LiveScope unit on the bow. He stares down at the screen through blue polarized lenses, his face shaded from the sun by the lightweight camo hoodie draped over his cap. 

“Ten o’clock,” he says before casting out a big swimbait. “Forty feet down and coming up.”

A few cranks on the reel keeps his bait above and in front of the fish, and the blip on the screen briefly rises before dropping back down. But Fillmore can still make out at least a dozen bronzebacks hanging nearer the lake bottom, so he pivots the bow with the trolling motor while Fogarty throws a tube bait toward the school. A fish hits the lure on the drop and he leans into the hookset to bury it.

The two anglers follow this pattern for most of the day, taking turns on the forward facing sonar as they work the huge lake from north to south. They focus on the smallmouth spots they’d dialed in – the same waypoints they’d analyzed, discussed, and obsessed over the night before. After four years of fishing across the country together, it’s a familiar game.

“That’s the beauty of being on a team,” says Fogarty, a native Pennsylvanian who came to Bethel on scholarship after making a name for himself as a two-time Bassmaster High School All American. “We’re all able to put our heads together and figure out a game plan, so if one team is struggling, we’ll try to give them an idea of what’s working. And that definitely helps, having a bunch of minds go at something.”

It’s also the assortment of minds (even more than the sheer number of them) that helps these anglers develop so quickly. Some are used to flipping jigs in heavy cover on murky Southern reservoirs, while others learned the finesse game on clear Midwestern lakes. Put the two together and you have one helluva bass fisherman. 

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Fogarty, who grew up fishing the salt with his dad, says this will be the third year that he and Fillmore have gotten a berth to the Bassmaster College National Championships by finishing in the top 20 percent at a qualifying tournament like the one on Kentucky Lake. It’s a point of pride for both anglers, who’ve been following Bethel’s rise since they were in middle school.

“Bethel got its name quite a few years ago because of all the hammers that went there — guys like Cole Floyd, John Garrett, and KJ Queen,” says Fillmore, whose habit of tacking “sir” onto most every “yes” gives away his rural Ohio roots. “I looked into a couple other schools, like Adrian and Campbellsville, but by the time I got an offer to go to Bethel, I’d already made up my mind.”

Like so many of his peers on the college circuit, Fillmore looks and lives the part of an outdoors jock, with a goatee and a crew cut that stays hidden underneath a trucker’s cap. He hunts ducks and deer when the bass aren’t biting, and he says the most illuminating part of the whole college experience has been the opportunity to see and fish so many lakes.

“I don’t care if you grew up on Kentucky Lake or somewhere like it. If you haven’t grown up traveling the country, you got a lot to learn coming straight out of high school.”

Study hall can’t last forever, though. And come tournament time, even the friendliest Minnesotans and the most courteous Alabamians are out for blood. 

Which explains why the Montevallo team made up of Jackson Pontius (Alabama) and Blair Erickson (Minnesota) weren’t afraid to run up on Dumke and Fothergill when they found the two already fishing a spot they’d marked the day before. Instead of moving to a new location, they fished within shouting distance of the reigning champs and caught three 4-pounders under their noses. 

“You hear a lot of the pros say this, too, but I believe that college fishing is probably one of the toughest circuits to fish,” Fogarty says. “You’ve got 250 teams made up of the best guys out there and they have the same dreams and aspirations. They just want to make it.”

Hammers in the Rough

If you ask Coach Mason what his primary role is, he’ll tell you it has little to do with the nuts and bolts of bass fishing. He’s also not the only coach who admits that most of the incoming freshmen are better anglers than they are. 

Mason earned his reputation over the years as one of the top crappie guides on Kentucky Lake. He’s shared his boat with plenty of fishing celebrities and pro anglers, along with Nashville legends like Jerry Reed and Hank Williams Jr. But when he got the chance to take Bethel’s dean of students crappie fishing a couple days after the Kentucky Lake tournament, he had one of his student anglers give him a tutorial on FFS beforehand.

The biggest part of a college fishing coach’s job is to set their students up for success by giving business advice, fostering connections with sponsors, organizing trips, and occasionally staying up all night to fix an outboard motor. But first, they have to seek out these competitors and sell them on the college experience, which is sometimes tougher than it sounds. Elite Series champ and Bethel alum John Garrett is a prime example.

Unlike Fogarty or Fillmore, or the umpteen other hopefuls who’ve sent Mason their resume over the years, Garrett says he had zero interest in going to college. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to fish professionally even though he’d been fishing Kentucky Lake and competing in local tourneys since he was a kid, always with his granddad as his boat captain. And he did well enough in the BASS high school circuit to catch Mason’s eye. He still remembers bumping into the head coach in the crowd at a Bassmaster Classic years ago, when Mason casually mentioned that he’d love to have him on the team at Bethel.

“I just had no idea what I was gonna do with myself, and two days after I graduated [high school], I went to work in my granddad’s marina,” Garrett says. “One day, Garry Mason walked in, and he offered me a scholarship to go to Bethel. At first, I was like, Hmmm, I don’t know.”

But the elder Garrett saw the opportunity for what it was and encouraged his grandson to give it a chance. After a slow start his freshman year (the West Tennessee native zeroed during his first tournament on Kentucky Lake) he found his stride.

“That next year, I started hitting on all cylinders, not just doing better in class but I was killing it on the water, and so were my teammates. We were crushing these tournaments, having a good time, and we were learning an insane amount,” Garrett says. “And as we headed into our junior year, it just continued. All of us had won a big tournament at some point, and that’s kind of when me and my other friends realized that we could push this college fishing thing into a career.”

He’s not alone in chasing that dream. If you look at the 130 anglers fishing the Elite Series today, about two dozen of them are under the age of 30. Of those, 22 came up through the college ranks. This new guard is extremely well-versed in new technology like FFS and GIS mapping, and because they grew up in the age of social media, many of them are natural self promoters.

“When you’re at college, and especially when I was at Bethel, there were so many diverse anglers — guys from Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Pennsylvania — and we all got put under the same roof,” Garrett says. “And I’ve always heard this, but it couldn’t be truer: The more you’re around better competition, the better you get.”

Even though many anglers enter college with aspirations of winning the Bassmaster Classic, an even greater number will graduate with other career opportunities because of the experience they gained — and the connections they made — in the college circuits. (Some have taken jobs at BASS or repped major tackle brands, and one is currently working as OL’s Engagement Editor.) In a worst-case scenario, they’ll leave school with a pile of fishing gear and a college degree.

Until then, though, it’s first place or bust.

“Iron Sharpens Iron”  

By the time the final morning of the tournament arrives, the rainstorms that pelted the lake all night have eased. The still-crowded field, down only a few boats due to engine troubles and disqualifications, takes off at 6:30 a.m., giving competitors eight hours to make their five fish count. And while Erickson and Pontius are sitting atop the leaderboard after catching 22-plus pounds on day one, Dumke and Fothergill are still the talk of the dock.

“I heard they started culling fish by 10 a.m.,” says one older gentleman at the marina. Another mentions something about the Bass Trakk numbers shown on the live tournament feed, and how you never can trust what the anglers are reporting. It’s too easy to sandbag or inflate the weights, he says.

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But the boys from Alabama weren’t lying, and midway through the weigh-in, Dumke and Fothergill still lead the pack with 41 pounds 5 ounces of total weight. They’re seated onstage as Cale brings up the other teams to weigh their bags

“How you boys feelin’?” the emcee asks. And as he looks out over the crowd sprawled out in the marina’s parking lot, I’m reminded that this is all part of the show — a made-for-TV moment that mirrors what most of these kids grew up watching on Sunday afternoons. “Those seats gettin’ hot yet?”      

Eventually, only a few teams are left standing in the weigh line as the reigning champs keep their seats. Bethel’s Fogarty and Fillmore come up, landing in second place with 40 pounds 4 ounces, and by the time they walk off the stage, there’s only one team left to weigh in. It’s Erickson and Pontius, and most of the crowd already knows what’s coming as an emotional Erickson takes the microphone.

“Man, we’ve said it time and time again, but iron sharpens iron,” he says, channeling the pros of tournaments past and their old chestnuts. “I wouldn’t be the angler I am today if it wasn’t for this team.”

After chatting up the two juniors, Cale shouts out their daily weight of 19 pounds 9 ounces, which gives them a winning total weight of 42 pounds 1 ounce. The four young men from Montevallo shake hands, even before the word “champion” is uttered, and then Dumke and Fothergill graciously exit stage left. They’ll let their peers soak it all in. For now.