Ben Provost and Mason Raveling have been fishing for about as long as they’ve been able to hold a fishing rod.

And just as the rods and lures they use have evolved, so have their bass fishing skills.

Those skills came into play Sept. 10 when the two seniors from Prior Lake High School competed in the Minnesota Junior Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) Nation High School State Championship on Lakes Washington and Stella, near Dassel.

Provost and Raveling, who were up against 48 teams, including three others from Prior Lake, won the title to advance to the national championships next year.

The small and large mouth bass started biting soon after the two seniors hit the water.

“Once we started catching them, I thought we would do pretty well and get high up in the standings, but everything’s uncertain,” Provost said.

It was a flurry of activity right in the morning, Raveling said.

Raveling and Provost caught 15 fish right away, each time keeping the largest ones and releasing the others.

“There’s always uncertainty,” Raveling said. “There’s big fish in the lake. You just don’t know who’s going to catch what. We saw some guys catching them near us that we knew they would have a big bag and they were second, I believe, so pretty close to us. You only have to catch five. There’s more than enough big ones to catch five big ones.”

The team limit was five largemouth or smallmouth bass, which had to be at least 12 inches long and could be caught by either member of the two-person team.

By afternoon, Provost, 18, and Raveling, 17, arrived at the weigh-in with their five bass, which tipped the scales at 20.57 pounds. Their largest fish came in at 4.49 pounds.

While this was their first time fishing on Lake Washington, it was their fourth year fishing in the state championship.

Yet, this win will be more memorable.

“It’s kind of special this year, at least, because this is our last state tournament as high schoolers, since we’re seniors now. We’ll be able to go to nationals one more time. It’s kind of special this time,” Provost said.

The top two teams are guaranteed spots in the B.A.S.S. (Bass Anglers Sportsman Society) Nation High School National Championship, which will take place in June in Kentucky.

Coming in second place was a team from Howard Lake with a total fish weight of 19.39 pounds.

Fifty-one teams from 18 schools across Minnesota competed in the championships.

After Provost and Raveling graduate from Prior Lake and compete in the national tournament next summer, they won’t be retiring their rods. Both are considering enrolling at Bemidji State University in fall 2018, and they plan to continue fishing.

Jeff Gilmer, youth director and president of Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation, is hopeful the national championship will allow the Minnesota league to send more than the top two teams, like they did last year.

“Based on our membership, B.A.S.S. will also award us — at the end of the year when they total up all the members — additional teams. So, last year (based on our membership), we sent seven high school teams, which is one of the largest in the nation, to the national championship,” Gilmer said. “The turnout and the enthusiasm shown by the students, “I think it’s phenomenal.”

The national participants have the chance to win a portion of the more than $80,000 available in college scholarships.

Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation is a nonprofit organization that helps hundreds of Minnesota boys and girls develop their love of fishing, conserve the environment, and earn the opportunity for college scholarships. Junior clubs are sponsored by adult B.A.S.S.

Nation Clubs with members of the adult clubs acting as mentors and educators for the young anglers.

“It’s about professionalism, environment, and the goal is for boaters to mentor and learn,” said Mary Deeg, secretary of Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation.

Qualifying for State

Teams who competed at state championship qualified in one of two ways — by winning a conference tournament earlier in the year or through volunteerism.

Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation has three conferences — northern, central and southern — and each conference had two tournaments. At those two conference tournaments, the top-seven teams qualified for state, Gilmer said. “So that’s 21 of the 51 teams that are here.”

The other 30 teams arrived through volunteer work.

For example, he said, some students helped teach fishing classes, volunteered to be a boat marshall at the classic B.A.S.S. with the professional anglers, or helped run a conference tournament for Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation.

“If they do that, each of their clubs gets what we call a wildcard spot, where they can send a team,” Gilmer said.

“So, we don’t just keep it to the best (anglers). We want the best fishing teams here, but we also want them to be stewards, understand outdoors, and learn about conservation. That’s what the volunteer part is all about. It’s a lot more than just fishing.”

The Big Day

For many of the high school anglers, excitement began building as soon as they qualified for state and it was at a fever pitch the first Sept. 9.

“Most of these anglers probably didn’t sleep last night. It’s a big deal,” Deeg said as she watched anglers take off from the landing around 7 a.m. at Dassel Rod and Gun Club on Lake Washington.

“You can’t make an angler. It’s in here,” she said, pointing to her heart. “It’s so cool to see it.”

Each boat includes two students and one adult — the boater.

The two students in each boat work together as a team. Some schools have one team competing, while others like Prior Lake High School, send two, three or four teams. So, students in one boat are competing against students from their high school in another boat.

The site for this year’s state championship was announced three weeks prior to the event, so anglers could study Lake Washington, and the smaller Lake Stella, which is connected by a channel. Many teams came out the first day to prefish and do some strategizing.

The competition started the morning of Sept. 10 with check-in at 5:30 a.m., a mandatory meeting at 6:15 a.m., and then boats launched in four flights. The boat order is a random-draw format. All boats were in the water by 7:45 a.m.

“The anglers decide as a team where they’re going to fish,” Deeg said.

The boater runs the boat’s big motor and the students can run the trolling motor. The students must catch, net and release their own fish.

“The boater has to be an adult; it’s a parent or a lot of them are adult members of Minnesota B.A.S.S., so they fish themselves. They are their coaches for the day,” Gilmer said.

However, “the boater can’t tell them, ‘I think you should fish over there,’” Deeg said, unless the advice is given during a timeout.

Each team gets five timeouts — four one-minute timeouts and one five-minute timeout. That’s the only time the boaters can tell the students what to do.

“Think of it like a basketball game,” Gilmer said. “You get a timeout ... and you can tell your team what to do.”

During a timeout, the boater can tell students to change lures, change locations or offer other advice.

“So, during the course of the day, they (boaters) get five timeouts to coach their team on what to do. The rest of the time they’re really there as observers,” Gilmer said. “They can take those timeouts at any time. Commonly, if their team is catching fish in the morning, they’re not going to say anything. They (the boaters) are going to save the timeouts until later in the day when they may run into trouble. If they go for the first half hour, hour and the boater knows we should be doing something, they will call one in the morning.”

Shortly after 2 p.m., some of the first boats started returning to the landing. The first flight was required to return by 2:30 p.m. for fish weigh-in, and then each flight thereafter came in 30 minutes later than the next, so that the last flight to go out onto the lake in the morning was the last flight to return to the landing in the afternoon.

“This lake has some tremendous smallmouth bass in it. You’ll see some really nice fish come in today,” Gilmer said Sunday morning.

He Was Right

Some of the teams’ bigger fish ranged in weight from 2.18 pounds to 6.36 pounds.

Provost and Raveling returned with their catch in an early flight, and watched as subsequent teams took their turn at the scale with their fish. The winners aren’t known until all the teams’ fish are weighed and recorded.

“It doesn’t matter who you are, anything can happen,” Provost said.

The two anglers caught 20 to 25 fish. The boys weighed and measured each fish on their boat and compared it to what they had already caught. They kept the five largest fish and released the others.

After each team’s fish were weighed in the afternoon, the students released their fish back into the lake.

“We’re educating the next generation,” said Randy Wilcox, vice president of Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation.

The high school members not only learn about fishing, they learn about aquatic invasive species when cleaning off their boats, and giving back through volunteerism, he said.

“They’re our next generation of sportsmen,” Wilcox said. “It’s not so much about fishing as it is about them becoming conservationists. Part of it has to do with fishing, but I like to look at it as life lessons they’re learning.”

Growth in Bass Fishing

The number of young women and men joining Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation’s high school league has grown since it became a nonprofit in 2012, with membership skyrocketing in the past two years.

The league had 18 members in 2013, 28 members in 2014, 56 members in 2015, 362 members in 2016, and more than 560 in 2017.

“I did not expect it to grow from about 60 kids to about 600. It’s blown up. It’s gotten really big,” Wilcox said.

In 2016, they had one conference and four tournaments. This year, they have three conferences and put on 11 tournaments from mid-June to mid-August, Gilmer said.

Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation’s three conferences will grow to four by next year, he said.

“There will be some restructuring. We are looking for volunteers,” Gilmer said. “We are going to have to add a director to run the conferences, because we can’t keep up with this growth. It’s essentially become a volunteer full-time job for us. We will be looking to bring people in for the conferences and people to help us do this next year.”

Gilmer was hoping the league would grow, but was surprised at how quickly it happened.

“To go from 56 members to 600 in two years, we didn’t quite expect that growth. We have a cutoff like all other sports in high school do; May 1 is the signup. We had 15 to 20 schools that wanted to sign up after that, and we had to say ‘no’ to that because we have to pull our permits on the lakes in advance — based on our membership. So we can’t just take more people because then we would have more people than what our permit allows to fish on the lakes.”

The league plans to send information packets to schools that have expressed an interest in joining. Schools interested in starting a club at the junior high or high school level can go online to the Youth BASS Nation website, www.mnbfn.org, for more information.

“We’re trying to get schools to embrace it. I’d like to see it sanctioned as a high school sport like trapshooting,” Wilcox said.

“I’d like to see kids letter in it. You cannot believe the quality of kids — how good they are at their sport, the fish they’re catching.”

The Minnesota Junior B.A.S.S. Nation is the fourth largest league in the country as far as participation, Wilcox said. “We’re looking to exceed that in the next few years.”

The league is attracting more high school students like Provost and Raveling each year.

When asked what it is they like about fishing, Raveling said slowly and with a smile, “everything.”

“I just like being outside and being out on the lake,” Provost said.

“And the way it’s unpredictable,” Raveling added. “It’s just amazing. Anything can happen.”

For more on the Minnesota B.A.S.S, go to www.mnbfn.org/highschool.