Fans often ask about the origin of our “cut ice cream” tradition. I go out for ice cream with Tiff, the kids and our friend and videographer Kyle any time I make a cut to Day 3. It wasn’t part of any grand plan but rather came together inadvertently, and it has now snowballed into a nice part of our life on the road … as long as I’m making cuts.
The process dates back to a 2018 tournament at Lake Martin. I was out on the water and Tiff went to the airport to pick up Kyle for his first tournament working with us. I knew him a little bit from high school, but we weren’t super close. She had never met him before, so as a sort of ice breaker, she took him to Dairy Queen.
There I am, grinding away, and when I looked at my phone, they’d sent me a pic of the two of them with large Blizzards, smiling away. It became their thing. Every time she picked him up from the airport, they’d get ice cream. Eventually, that spread to the camper. We were all eating a lot of ice cream. At the rate we were going, we would all end up weighing 300 pounds, and that wasn’t a reasonable option, especially given the tight confines of our RV.
So we made a deal – no ice cream during practice, no ice cream unless I made the cut. There wasn’t some catchy name for it, just cut ice cream.
After we did it for a while and posted it on social media, it picked up a life of its own. Other anglers started doing the same. Maybe they got a check in a weekend event or in their club derby. It eventually grew enough that we made a logo and produced hats. It even became part of our wedding reception when we had a local ice cream cart show up.
We’ve developed some parameters around the ritual. We try to go to a local place if it’s convenient and practical. If that’s not possible, there seems to be a DQ in every small town in America. In order to keep things reasonable, I now order a mini-Blizzard, although Tiff and Kyle still lean into a small or medium.
That’s the story, but there’s a more meaningful message behind it. While I’m the one out on the water, every person in that camper is part of the team. When things go well, we celebrate together. The girls always ask, “Did you catch big ones so we can get ice cream?” To be honest, I’d rather have a bag of chips than ice cream most of the time, but the team bonding means the world to me.
It’s expanding, too. Sometimes boat drivers or fans will join us. Five or six years into this unintended process, fans will walk up to me and give me DQ gift cards or cash and say, “We’re buying.” It happened at a boat show in January: “First cut ice cream is on us!” It’s mind-blowing to me that something kind of silly builds community.
Of course, there’s also pressure on me to get the job done on the water or everybody suffers. Last year, I had a 53rd-place finish. I started off the 2026 season with another one. Kyle and Tiff have enough of a filter to keep quiet about it – they know that missing a cut is more painful than missing ice cream – but Kora and Kyra are genuinely and openly disappointed when there’s no ice cream on Friday. Eventually, they’ll learn not everything comes easily and we can’t just make every cut at will, but I like that they’re learning that there are rewards for good efforts and good performances.
