As Kyle Alsop drove away from Florence, Ala., on Sunday and headed back to his home in Overland Park, Kan., tears formed in his eyes. His stomach was twisted up, too, mostly with excitement, relief and anticipation.
The raw emotion was understandable since Alsop was heading back to the Midwest as the FLW College Fishing individual national champion after beating his Kansas State University teammate Travis Blenn last Saturday in a fish-off at Wilson Lake.
Their head-to-head meeting came a day after they teamed up to win the FLW College Fishing team title at Wheeler Lake.
“It’s unbelievable,” Alsop said. “It hasn’t hit me yet that we won the championship. It makes the drive a lot shorter when you’re coming back with the national title and a berth in the Cup.”
Alsop graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering last December, but his goal is make a name for himself in the fishing world. He’ll get his first shot in August when he competes in the Forrest Wood Cup at Lake Murray.
“I’m just thankful for the all support from everyone along the way,” he said. “I feel very blessed and I’m pumped for the opportunity. I’m ready to rock and roll. I need to make sure I do everything I can to make sure I have a good tournament. It’ll be a whole different caliber of guys I’m going up against.”
The win by Alsop and Blenn came after Alsop predicted a victory back when FLW announced the venue for this year’s championship.
“I told him last August that we were going to win this tournament,” Alsop said. “I told him to get ready for the head to head portion. When they said it would be at Wheeler in the first week of June, I knew it’d be exactly how I like to fish – offshore.”
During the 3-day team event, Alsop and Blenn mixed up presentations with a Zoom Brush Hog. They dragged it on a Carolina rig or a swing-head jig along ledges near Decatur or brush piles. They also flipped it around docks.
On the final day, they relied on a shaky-head for a few bites, but the Brush Hog was the big producer.
“Each day, we went in with a mindset to fish for the day and to think on the fly,” Alsop said. “We were not trying to time spots.”
In the end, their 44-12 total over three days topped 2015 FLW college champs Patrick Walters and Gettys Brannon of the University of South Carolina for the title.
During the head-to-head individual final at Wilson, Alsop boated a 3 1/2-pounder to start his day and that set the tone for him. Like some of the fish he caught at Wheeler, it fell for a Carolina-rigged creature bait around some offshore brush.
It turned out to be the only deep fish he caught, though.
“That first fish made a huge difference,” he said. “If I don’t catch it, who knows what happens. That fish was huge, and my fifth keeper was also huge.”
In between, it was a grind. He was stuck on four keepers for quite a while and noted he wasn’t sharp mentally.
“About noon, my wheels started to spin,” he said. “I was missing fish. I had fish knocking my frog 2 feet out of water. I was missing pitches. I was making errors and I started to get frustrated. I was fishing fast and trying to catch my fifth one. The walls were starting to close in on me. I thought I was getting ready to choke. That’s all that went through my head.”
Eventually, he finished his limit and culled twice before heading in with 10-05, which was good for nearly a 3-pound win over Bless.
“When I caught that fifth one, it was like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders,” he said. “I ended up slowing down after that.”
