“We didn’t want this to be a burnout club that lasted four years [just] so we could have fun. We wanted this to last longer than that, it’s just harder to do when you don’t find as many kids that are [as] interested and dedicated as we were.”
Entering his second year as president of the Winthrop bass fishing team, Collins Janus is fishing for recruits after graduates and students transferring due to COVID-19 shortened his roster.
“We’ll take anybody. If you said tomorrow ‘I want to learn how to fish,’ we can take that person in tomorrow and be able to help them as much as we can,” Janus said.
“Nobody that does these [competitions] has the ultimate, complete knowledge,” he said. “There are elements you can study for, but then it’s a matter of following what happens when you’re out there.”
Founded in 2016, the bass fishing team is a club sports team at Winthrop, however, not all club members are interested in being competitive.
“At the end of the day it’s a thing to get people involved on campus,” Janus said. “This is actually the first level of fishing I’d ever done competitively. It’s a lot of fun.”
Since Janus oversees all the planning and logistics, he explained that the team is “eligible to compete in everything,” but chooses what events to enter.
The Bassmaster College Series and Fishing League Worldwide (FLW) are the two major organizations that the team follows. “They would be like your equivalent to the NCAA,” Janus said.
Although typically participating in two or three tournaments a season, there are also various smaller ones across the country. Over the last couple of years, the team attended tournaments in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and even as far as the St. Lawrence River in New York.
“They offer [tournaments] as far west as California, we just haven’t been gutsy enough to make that trip,” Janus said.
The team usually competes in spring semester events, but some events were moved to the fall this year because of COVID-19. When the team is not competing, they search for community outreach opportunities.
“A lot of our community service hours tie into what we do anyways,” Janus said. “[We’re] just trying to get involved locally.”
According to Janus, the team had multiple lake cleanups planned for this past spring, but those had to be postponed. Last December, the team helped with Operation Christmas Child.
Making connections locally is also extremely beneficial when it comes to sponsors. The Winthrop bass fishing team sports long-sleeved jerseys that advertise for a variety of businesses.
“We support the companies that support us,” Janus said. “In turn, they will give us donations, whether it be money or actual equipment. We have sponsors in the Lake Norman area, even a couple local businesses in Rock Hill.
“The benefit of the people who founded this club was that they were high school anglers. A lot of the sponsors they worked with in high school they had relationships with, so they maintained [them] through college,” he said.
Since the team gains funding from the school and sponsors, there are no required fees for members. Despite these built–in funds, Janus said the team actively looks for other potential sponsors to keep their program “accessible to any student that wants to be involved,” regardless of skill level.
“I wouldn’t sit here and lie to you and say I’m some really good angler,” he said. “It’s a learning process and every year you try to get better. We’re always trying to grow and evolve each and every year.”
You can follow the bass fishing team on Instagram @wubassfishing or contact the team by email using the address wubassfishing@mailbox.winthrop.edu.
Photo by Gabrielle Reid
