Fishing your local club tournaments and open tournaments is a great way to start out your bass fishing adventures. It is a great way to learn everything from all the rules of tournament bass fishing to the excitement of the blast offs to the weighing in of the fish. Most importantly in bass fishing tournaments you need to learn what some are forgetting and that is Sportsmanship. When I started fishing tournaments over 20 years ago you could find maybe one a month somewhere pretty close by. However, today you can find a tournament almost every weekend. I fished my very first tournament at the age of 16 with a very good friend that I still fish with today. I was a few years younger than he was and I looked up to him.  I was very excited to get to fish this tournament with him. It was a volunteer fire department tournament from a couple of counties away. One of the good things about most open tournaments in my area is that they benefit all kinds of different organizations. When we rolled into the marina that evening to register I got a little nervous to see all the boats that was there waiting to register. After we all registered we had a small meeting and were told we had 98 boats registered. I knew it was going to be tough with that many boats on only a 710 acre lake, but we fished hard all night long and ended up winning our very first event. I remember it still today as if I had just won the Bass Masters Classic. It was an awesome feeling and that is all it took to get me addicted to competitive bass fishing.

After fishing several more tournaments on my home lake and eventually winning the largest open event in 2000, followed up the very next year with a second place finish, I decided to start traveling to other much larger lakes to try my luck. The last few years I have fished the Fishers of Men National Trail and made their regional every year I fished it. I have got to meet a lot of great people fishing on different lakes in different towns. One thing I have definitely learned is you have to start out small and work your way up as you do in anything. I am still in the learning stages and am not ashamed to admit it. Fortunately, I have been very privileged to have some wonderful sponsors that believe in me and support me.