Event: 2023 Strike King Bassmaster College National Championship presented by Bass Pro Shops
Scenario: The 2025 Progressive Bassmaster Elite Series was pretty good to Tucker Smith, with the Birmingham, Ala., pro claiming a big blue trophy in the Tackle Warehouse Bassmaster Elite at Lake Fork, en route to earning the Dakota Lithium Bassmaster Rookie of the Year title. (He also won the Ultimate Angler Championship at Lake Guntersville.)
Impressive, but Smith’s winning ways began well before his rookie Elite season. In fact, his Bassmaster resume includes three Bassmaster High School National Championship wins (2018-2020), a 2021 Bassmaster College Series tournament victory and the 2023 College Series National Championship title at Pickwick Lake.
In Smith’s own words, the latter win marked a turning point in his thinking — one that has had a profound impact on his professional career. With that event presenting a scenario ideal for Smith’s preferences, he and partner Hayden Marbut went wire-to-wire with nearly a 3-pound winning margin.
“During that event the fish were offshore, and offshore fishing on TVA lakes is my favorite way to fish,” Smith said. “Hayden and I were looking for schools of fish in off-the-wall places — deep and shallow — just stuff that people weren’t going to find.
“We had some pretty obvious community holes, but then we had some sneaky places. We had a couple of places where we caught most of our fish, and they were pretty sneaky places.”
As Smith noted, this event took place just before the current minnow craze, so it was more of a traditional ledge tournament. Knowing what they’d be facing, Smith invested long practice days side-scanning countless miles of offshore structure.
“We ended up catching a bunch of fish off a place that nobody ended up fishing, and it had at least 100 bass on it,” Smith recalls. “We ended up catching a good bag (20-8) the first day.”
The final push: Leading the field into the second round, Smith and Marbut revisited their Day 1 spot, but while the school was still there, the bite was slower. They managed to stay on top with a bag that went 15-4, but the championship round proved much tougher.
When noon of Day 3 found Smith and his partner with only 12 pounds, they knew their only shot at pulling out the win would require them to take a chance.
“We were seeing a bunch of fish, but some of them were starting to scatter,” Smith said. “We ran around a bunch, and we weren’t catching much, but we finally pulled up to a place where I had seen some fish in practice.
“We put the trolling motor down and there were more fish than we had seen on that place all week. In the last hour and a half, we ended up culling out everything we had and catching all of our weight (18-0).”
Smith said that final day was a grind, but it demonstrated precisely what he loves about ledge fishing — it can happen at any moment.
“That’s why I love it so much — that next stop can be the winning hole; you just have to find it,” he said. “If we hadn’t moved and figured them out, we wouldn’t have won the tournament.”
The decision: Victories often hinge on one key decision, and for Smith and Marbut, it came down to a couple good calls. First, their faith in a spot that probably wouldn’t interest most proved essential in anchoring their win with a big Day 1 bag, while keeping them in the hunt on Day 2.
“That spot (a shellbar in 20 feet) was kind of hidden on a place that didn’t look amazing on the map, but it ended up being a lot better than I thought,” Smith said. “I was just side-scanning all of practice and looking for as many places as I could.
“I just ended scanning over that place, and it had a lot more fish than anywhere else. I think that was probably because it didn’t look that good on the map, and it wasn’t getting fished very hard. The fish weren’t getting pressured, and they were grouped up better than anywhere else.”
The first two days, Smith and his partner caught their fish on football jigs, swimbaits, hair jigs and a jighead minnow. Several of those baits also served them when they decided to make that fourth-quarter move.
“Late in the final day, we ended up fishing a deep spot with stumps,” Smith said. “It was directly in the current. I had scanned it during practice and knew that it looked like a spot where fish might set up.
“We were just running through and scanning a bunch of places that had potential. We saw a bunch of fish on that spot, but we thought they were all carp and drum. They were all bass and they were bigger than anything I’d seen and there were a lot more than most of the places we’d fished.”
Smith said his experience on TVA lakes told him that afternoons typically find bass tightly gathering. Maybe it’s the warming surface temperatures pushing them deeper, or the predictably increasing current; whatever the case, the eventual winners made the most of their opportunity.
“It didn’t take long for us to start catching them,” Smith gleefully recalled. “We were freaking out and we ended up just casting whatever we had on the deck into the school, because we got them fired up with the first couple of casts we threw in there.
“Once you get a school fired up, you just have to get back in there as quickly as possible, while they’re still fired up. If you don’t get a bait in there within 30 seconds to a minute, most of those fish pick up and move somewhere, looking for something to eat. If they move off the spot, they’ll slide off into deep water and split up.”
Game changer: Smith attributes his team’s success to their flexibility — not getting locked into one thing. That’s the part that has helped him in his pro career.
“You always have to keep your options open and be willing to look around and find new fish,” Smith said. “That was the first year I was more open to looking for stuff during a tournament, and that has helped me in the long run.
“When you’re in high school, you find a pattern and an area and you want to fish it, but now that I’ve had some experience in these bigger tournaments, a lot of times, you have to pull up your trolling motor and look around for new stuff during the tournament. A lot of times, that’s the best way to find more fish, that’s the best way to catch a big bag.”
Takeaway: With age comes wisdom and Smith saw that 2023 College Championship win as not only a huge milestone in his career, but also an important stage in his personal development.
“Everything changes throughout the week, and you have to be adapting constantly to the changing conditions,” Smith said. “That’s what we ended up having to do, and it ended up winning us the tournament.
“That’s something I struggled with, but I’ve learned to shift my way of fishing into finding as much as you can, adapting with the fish and not getting stubborn.”
