Right at home
Bryan anglers shine on Chickamauga
Home-water advantage doesn’t pay off as often as some might expect in bass tournaments, but it certainly did last Saturday on Chickamauga Lake in the FLW College Fishing Southeastern event conducted from Dayton Boat Dock.
Two University of Tennessee at Chattanooga anglers, Patrick Hoskins and Dillon Falardeau, finished 10th out of 203 boats, and a University of Tennessee duo from Knoxville and Madison, Tenn., finished fourth.
Much closer than any other other participating school, though, was Bryan College of Dayton, and it wound up with the champions plus two other pairs who qualified for the 2017 FLW College National Championship. Yet another duo from the third-year program already had qualified for that May 31-June 3 event on Lake Wheeler in Alabama.
“Our school is about six blocks away from the lake, so I was able to practice here every day for the last month,” Bryan sophomore business major Cole Sands, a Walker Valley High School graduate from Calhoun, Tenn., said in an FLW news release after he and Connor Cohran from Dalton, Ga., won the tournament Saturday. “I think I fished every single grass mat on this lake.
“I figured out the pattern. The fish were not in the grass. They were right by it waiting to go in. It was almost like fishing offshore, but in grass. For a while this morning we were catching them on every single cast. Our most productive stretches were from Soddy Creek to Chester Frost (Park).”
In a subsequent Bryan College report on the tournament, Sands said the fish were “sitting on the grass edge in about 10-12 feet of water.” He said he and Cohran “lost a few big fish at the start” but began to gather momentum when they pulled in a 4 1/2-pounder.
They totaled 16 pound, 3 ounces with their five keepers. That was one ounce more than the haul by South Carolina’s Patrick Walters and Gettys Brannon, who won the 2015 FLW college nationals. The Gamecocks got $1,000 for their club, while the winning Lions earned $2,000 for theirs.
“Today was so exciting,” Cohran, a freshman biology major, said in the FLW release. “This was my first-ever college fishing tourney, and Cole really put us on some fish. The morning was a little better, but we caught around 35 fish today. We caught probably 25 of them on a green-pumpkin-colored MGC jig with a Strike King Rage Craw and the other 10 on swimbaits: a Strike King Shadalicious and a Gambler Big EZ.”
Qualifiers for the FLW college national tournament include the top 15 boats from the FLW College Fishing Open and 10 from each of the three regular-season tournaments in five conferences. Last Saturday’s event was the final Southeastern opportunity, and Bryan’s Jake Lee and Jacob Foutz finished 11th with fellow Lions Dylan Pritchett and Connor Thompson 12th. They got spots in the 2017 nationals because two teams in the top 10 had qualified previously.
Bryan’s Dylan Kear and Nathan Bell already were set for the nationals because of their 14th-place finish in the Open.
Bryan finished 18th and sixth the last two years in the Cabela’s school of the year standings, but last weekend was the club’s first major tournament victory.
“Our guys have a lot of confidence and know they can take on any team,” coach Mike Keen said in the school release. “They feel like they belong and can compete with anybody and everybody. You’re supposed to win at home, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
“Hopefully this win brought some notoriety to the college in some areas we may have not reached before.”