By Jackson Keenan, Staff
Cru Bass created a club that combines the enjoyment of fishing with the ever-growing competitive fishing scene.
Club president senior criminal justice major Tanner Creel describes how the club has changed in the past two years.
“Cru Bass is a student organization right now. We are pretty broad at the moment. We're a club that is really trying to get more people out on the water, but in the past two years, we have seen an increase in interest in fishing tournaments,” Creel said.
Bass fishing as a collegiate sport is run by the Collegiate Bass Fishing Championship and has competitions all around the country giving cash prizes to some of the winners. The Cru Bass team most recently competed in a tournament at Table Rock National park in Missouri, where they finished 42nd and 55th out of 250 teams.
Creel, in his experiences at these collegiate competitions, says, “The atmosphere is incredible. I would never have thought I'd be fishing anything like that, let alone traveling to Missouri and Oklahoma and outside of Texas. It's been just a huge opportunity for something I never really thought I'd be able to do,” Creel said.
Although Cru Bass has grown in the past few years, it still faces issues especially when it comes to finding boats for its competitions. Due to not being an athletic team they do not receive the funding to support buying a team boat. This means that club members who want to fish in tournaments need to borrow, rent or a boat in order to secure a tournament spot.
“They are schools that have deemed their fishing programs an actual sport, and so they get put into the athletic funding, which gives them the opportunity to buy a boat once a semester, once a year. For us, the only boats we have access to are pretty much what we can scrounge up ourselves, and the reason I say it like that is last year, it was, if you had a boat, you could be on the team, and if you had tournaments, if you didn't have a boat, you could be on the team, but there's no guarantee that you could go to a tournament,” Creel said.
However the team has been working with Texas Boat World who has been letting them rent their boats out for these tournaments and events. With one semester left before Creel graduates, he hopes he can pass down the knowledge and skill to see the club grow to new heights and compete with some of the best college teams in the state of Texas.
“I hope I can pass my knowledge and some of my skills down to underclassmen to where they can keep it going and keep showing the school that this could be a really good program for their students,” Creel said.
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