MASSENA, N.Y. (Aug. 26, 2024) – The University of Alabama duo of Cooper Gilroy of Middlebury, Connecticut, and Hayden O’Barr of Scottsboro, Alabama, won the MLF College Fishing tournament on the St. Lawrence River Presented by Simms Sunday with a five-bass limit weighing 25 pounds, 1 ounce. The victory earned the Crimson Tide bass club qualification into the 2025 MLF College Fishing National Championship.
“We made a real long run, about a 140-mile round trip, just looking for suspended bass over schools of bait,” said O’Barr.
The run took the anglers to an area not far from Lake Ontario.
“We were looking for shoals that top out around 30 and drop off into real deep water on the river channel,” O’Barr added. “Sometimes they were big bait balls, but mostly smaller bait balls and real big schools of bass. Our first school was maybe over 300 fish. A lot of them were small. We only got one big one off that spot. Then we ran down to our next shoal that was also suspended bass and caught the rest of our weight and a 6-pound smallmouth, all using a jighead minnow.”
The Crimson Tide anglers caught all their fish using forward-facing sonar and a Deps Sakamata Shad. And it all went down pretty quickly. In the first hour alone, they caught a little over 50 keepers then reversed course to ensure they had plenty of time to get back to weigh-in and they could keep their fish alive.
“It was crazy,” O’Barr said. “It was an unreal day.”
For Gilroy, a junior business major, and O’Barr, a recent graduate who’s going to be guiding on Lake Guntersville while pursuing a professional tournament fishing career, catching fish on the St. Lawrence was not the biggest challenge. The fish were “very cooperative.” This win was all about strategy and execution.
“(The key was) just keeping a positive mental attitude and knowing that, you know, if we do our job in practice, that it’ll happen tournament day,” O’Barr said. “It’s unreal. I mean, we had a really rough year this year. A lot of stuff went wrong for us – a bunch of boat troubles – but we finally pulled one off.”
The top four teams that qualified to compete at the 2025 College Fishing National Championship are:
1st: University of Alabama – Cooper Gilroy, Middlebury, Conn., and Hayden O’Barr, Scottsboro, Ala., five bass, 25-1
2nd: Mansfield University – Myken Barnes, Williamsport, Pa., and Beaux Rohrbaugh, Mansfield, Pa., five bass, 21-15
3rd: Lamar State College – Orange – Holden Hatcher and JD Sewell, both of Beaumont, Texas, five bass, 21-10
4th: University of Vermont – Colin Griesser and Hunter Whitman, both of Shelburne, Vt., five bass, 20-3
Rounding out the top 10 are:
5th: Clarkson University – Tyler Combes, Martville, N.Y., and James Gillis, Milford, N.H., five bass, 19-6
6th: Northwestern State University – Ross Miller, Rayne, La., and Cole Pickett, Robeline, La., five bass, 19-1
7th: University of Georgia – Marcus Prince, Athens, Ga., and Samuel Shoemaker, Oakwood, Ga., 18-9
8th: Paul Smith’s College – Brenden Lucia, Jefferson, Mass., and Collin Trapiss, Macedon, N.Y., 18-4
9th: Clarkson University – Carter Jackson, Hogansburg, N.Y., and Aleksander Smietana, Chenango Forks, N.Y., five bass, 18-1
10th: Lawrence Technological University – Teh Cornelius, Battle Creek, Mich., and William Finn, Ypsilanti, Mich., five bass, 17-14
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College Fishing Tournaments