The Bryan College fishing team had the championship pair and two other teams who qualified for the 2017 FLW College National Championship because of their finish in this past Saturday’s FLW College Fishing Southeastern event on Chickamauga Lake. Another Bryan team previously qualified for the national championship tournament.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).”