On today’s look into Hunter’s mind, let’s talk about an aspect of fishing that gets overlooked a lot—the importance of learning from a trusted friend or mentor. Many of our top anglers in the sport today were mentored by the legends of yesterday. I’ll dive into who I’ve been mentored by over the years as well as answering the following questions: Why is this the case? How can we create mentors and mentees? For anyone trying to improve their skillsets, this might be one of my most important columns to date.

Throughout my fishing career, I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by some really great anglers. For starters, my dad taught me how to think like a fish. He was always full of old school hunting and fishing wisdom. I learned to ask “why?” to nearly everything from him. I often was lectured about the importance of matching the hatch, sneaking up on the fish, and paying attention to the smallest details of the day and your presentation. It was clear that Dad always looked at hunting and fishing as a “cat and mouse” game where you had to outsmart the wildlife.

As I grew older, I was fortunate to have a family friend who was active in the local tournament scene invite me into his boat. I fished with Andy Cameron more than I fished alone during my college years. Andy loved to fish offshore and target specific pieces of cover. The techniques we used weren’t all that different from how I fished growing up, but he had more of a run and gun tendency. We had quite a bit of success in those days and a lot of those tendencies to fish offshore still exist in my game today.

Local Elite Series pro Skylar Hamilton was someone else who took me under his wing when I had graduated college. Skylar taught me a lot about fishing outside of East Tennessee. The way that he approached tournaments, his mindset around planning a tournament day, and preparation for the season were all things that I learned from Skylar. One of the biggest lessons that I learned while fishing with Skylar was how important it was to adjust quickly.

Today, I’m able to serve as both a mentor and a mentee to the anglers on the Carson-Newman University fishing team. While I love educating these anglers, it’s impressive to me how much I’m able to learn from them. This next generation is a lot more talented than anyone realizes.

So, why is mentorship so important? Our sport is constantly evolving, but fish behavior generally stays the same. We learn more efficient ways to target them and new baits to trick them into biting, but for the most part, where they live and the types of things that trigger bites remain unchanged. While I’ve learned a lot on days spent by myself, fishing with someone else exponentially increases the speed in which we learn. The technique that takes months to perfect can be taught in a day. Confidence also increases when you’re able to watch someone have success using a specific pattern or technique. Today’s world of bass fishing moves quick. A bass fisherman’s prime is getting younger each year. To be able to increase your talent level by that age, it’s almost impossible to do on your own. The world of high school and college fishing has formed close-knit friend groups that eat, sleep, and breathe fishing. These guys are networking and sharing ideas at a level that hasn’t been seen before.

That leads me to the next conversation—how can we create mentorship opportunities? The first route is through high school and college fishing. On my team, one of the main strategies in angler development is taking a freshman and putting him in the boat with an older, more-seasoned angler. This forces the learning process to happen and happen quickly. A year spent learning from a more experienced angler can teach a freshman more than two or three years of fishing by himself. In turn, this angler will see the benefit of being mentored and return the favor to a new freshman down the road. Making this process happen outside of organized fishing teams can be difficult. The reality is that you need a certain degree of success to be invited into most fishing circles. Sometimes the only way to start this process is by spending long hours to improve to the point of being competitive. Once you have a little bit of success, the conversations around fishing will naturally start to happen.

Mentorship is needed to keep pushing our sport forward. Anglers who have been successful in creating a fishing career have a responsibility to teach someone behind them how to do the same. Fishing is a very isolating sport, and the success of each generation is going to rely heavily on the previous generation. We should all work to teach younger anglers the fishing information, business skills, and moral compass necessary to succeed in this sport at the highest level.