The Ranch Cities were well represented during the 55th Bassmaster Classic presented by Under Armour, with Pilot Point fishing duo of Austin Brown and Aiden Hamblin finishing sixth in the Strike King Bassmaster High School Classic.
Aiden and Brown, who earned their spot at the event after taking home first place in the Strike King Bassmaster High School Series Open at Sam Rayburn Reservoir last May, were one of 10 teams from across the nation to qualify for the tournament.
“Growing up, I watched the Bassmaster Classic every year, and I always dreamed of being up with them,” Brown said. “… It was huge to have one last run here with my buddy, [Aiden]. It’s sad we couldn’t capitalize and win, but I enjoyed every second of it.”
Aiden echoed his teammate’s feelings on how special it was for them to compete on the grandest stage of the sport fishing world.
“Like [Austin] said, growing up, watching the classic and seeing these guys walk across that stage, … we’re extremely blessed to be here,” he said. “I’ll be continuing to fish in college, and hopefully I can make it back up there someday.”
Being from the area, Aiden and Brown said they were familiar with the bass in Eagle Mountain Lake and primarily concentrated on polishing their strategy and preparing their equipment.
“We live here and fish these lakes pretty often, so we focused on learning how the fish react to certain baits and presentations,” Aiden said. “In practice, our main baits were classic bed fishing baits. … In the tournament, we started off throwing an umbrella rig, a minnow [and] a shaky head, and we caught our shaky head fish pretty early— probably, five or 10 minutes in.”
The duo followed their first catch, which weighed in at two pounds, with a five-pounder they caught off a bed, but the two bass would be all the pair could bring for the day.
“I threw a shaky head and a chatter bait, trying to hit the shallow areas, with [Aiden] throwing the umbrella rig,” Brown said. “It was kind of a tough [plan] because you throw a rig out deep and a shaky head in shallow water, so it was hard to find a middle ground.” Brown and Aiden weighed in at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth with a total of 7 pounds, 3 ounces, trailing tournament winners Landon Gabby and Kolby Baker of Marion County High School in Illinois, who weighed in with five fish totaling 14 pounds, 1 ounce.
Despite not winning the tournament, boat captain Will Hamblin said he was overjoyed to see the two young anglers compete on the big stage.
“I’m really blessed to be in the position to be able to watch these kids be rewarded for the amount of work and effort that they put in, all through high school,” he said. “To get to this point was always a goal for them, and years ago, we would talk about, ‘Oh, this is our dream. We want to qualify for Nationals. We want to be able to get to the high school classic,’ and there were only nine [other] teams that qualified nationwide, so to see these two boys be one of those teams that are considered the absolute best in all the nation in high school fishing was absolutely amazing.”
