As the first post on Varsity Bass I thought it would be fitting to look back a little on the history of the sport.

IU v. Purdue

While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment an entire sport begins – who’s to say on some unrecorded spring day a few kids from neighboring schools didn’t get together in the 1960’s or 70’s and fish against each other for bragging rights? – it’s widely accepted that the first organized college bass club formed at Indiana University in 1987, and the first intercollegiate tournament was held between IU and state rival Purdue in 1992.

As outlined on the current IU club website, the Hoosier club came about because of the vision and determination of a single person, Professor Stephen Lutz.

Appropriately, the idea of making bass fishing a college sport came to Professor Lutz at a pivotal moment in the wider development of bass fishing as we recognize it today.

Enter the B.A.S.S. Boss

Not long out of college, Lutz had sent a trophy bass to a taxidermist in Alabama and, ever with his ear to the ground, this had caught the attention of budding B.A.S.S boss Ray Scott, who invited Lutz to attend the 1968 Dixie Invitational on Smith Lake.

B.A.S.S. was officially founded earlier that same year and the Smith Lake event was one of its very first sanctioned tournaments. First and second place in the competition went to future bass stars Bill Dance and Tom Mann.

Awed by his first tournament experience, Lutz drove home with the spark of an idea to keep him company – why couldn’t competition bass fishing become a collegiate sport just like football or basketball or baseball?

One by One

Though Lutz was sure he’d hit on something, he joined the Air Force two months after the Dixie Invitational and it wasn’t until nearly twenty years later when he accepted a position as a professor at IU that he saw an opportunity to follow through on his inspiration.

The first club meeting attracted eight students, but by the following year there were 50. The first club tournament was held on April 17 1988, though the Bassmaster Classic it definitely wasn’t:

“It was a humble beginning,” Lutz said of the event, “I would take one student at a time in my boat while the other students stood and fished on the bank at Lake Monroe, and every 30 minutes, I would go back to the ramp and trade students.”

Shad Rap

As a freshman at Purdue in 1990 Shad Schenck was a young man with a laser focus on entering the realm of professional bass angling. Rather than wait for graduation to pursue his ambitions, Schenck determined he would bring competition fishing to campus by forming Purdue’s first bass club and introducing the sport to the other schools in the Big 10.

As reported by fishing journalist Rob Newell in the June 2003 issue of FLW Outdoors, Schenck reached out to the newly formed bass club at IU to borrow its charter. He added an emphasis on tournament fishing including “paper” tournaments run on the honor system to introduce club members to competition fishing and a stated goal of organizing tournaments against other teams in the Big 10.

Not that getting the club off the ground was entirely straightforward: a few buddies gladly took on the role of club officers, but a faculty advisor was a lot harder to come by:

“I could not find a dean, professor, teacher’s assistant or anyone that even knew what a plastic worm was. One day, I was walking through campus, and I overheard a groundskeeper talking about bass fishing. I got about 50 yards past him when the light bulb went off in my head. I sprinted back to him and basically barged in on his conversation. It turns out he was an avid bass angler and the Dean of Students let him qualify as a faculty adviser since he was an employee of the university.”

The Old Minnow Bucket

With pioneering bass clubs springing up at two schools that share a historic rivalry, it was natural for them to take the tradition to the water. The first “Old Minnow Bucket” (in homage to the Old Oaken Bucket of Purdue v. Indiana football fame) and the first official intercollegiate bass tournament anywhere in the nation was fished on April 18, 1992 on Lake Monroe. Purdue won that day and the event has gone on to become an annual fixture between the two schools.

The Big 10

The ongoing publicity garnered by the Old Minnow Bucket and the promotional efforts of Lutz and Schenck eventually spread to the rest of the Big 10 schools as both men had hoped.

The first Big 10 Classic was fished in 1995 and by 2002 nine of the 11 schools in the Big 10 conference had signed up. The event has become a traditional feature on the college circuit, with last year’s tournament staged on Coldwater Lake, Minnesota and won by the University of Wisconsin.

In a mark of how far college bass fishing has come, that event was televised on the Versus channel, now part of NBC Sports.

College anglers owe Lutz and Schenck a real debt of gratitude.