The University of Tennessee Bass Fishing Team is a club, not a varsity sport.

Competing with other collegiate bass fishing programs requires the club to not only supply its own gear and boats, but to prepare its own season schedule, to raise awareness on its popular Instagram page and to manage its 21 sponsorships. This season, the club’s membership is its highest ever, according to club president Cody Domingos.

Through the challenges of facilitating a competitive team — and qualifying for the Bassmaster College Series National Championship in January — student executives are learning how to build a brand while sharing their love of the sport.

“It can be a lot, and it can be stressful at times,” Domingos, a senior marketing major, said. “But it’s also an invaluable experience.”

The executive team’s behind-the-scenes functions make the club unique among college fishing teams. At other universities, coaches handle executive duties, according to Domingos.

“While there’s benefits to that, I see the benefits on my side of it as now I actually understand how to make all this happen,” Domingos said.

For example, running a competitive collegiate bass fishing team costs a lot of money: for food, for lodging at tournaments and for gas to travel to and from tournament sites. Thus, the executive team must cultivate relationships with almost two dozen sponsors.

“The biggest thing that I’ve learned is how to professionally deal with all these sponsors, and how to make good business deals, as well as keep your business in good standing with those companies that are supporting you,” Domingos said.

Sponsors have fully reimbursed the team’s travel costs since 2023, according to Mason Thompson, team social media manager. Plus, sponsors enable the team to send more boats to tournaments.

“The numbers used to be a lot smaller,” Thompson, a junior business management major, said. “And now we can send a strong eight to 10 boats down to a tournament and be confident that people are going to go and they’re going to get reimbursed, and it’s not a financial strain and allows you to focus on the fishing and competing more.”

Thompson said that being club treasurer last school year gave him his first experience with entrepreneurship. After UT’s baseball team won the 2024 NCAA Division I Baseball Championship, he capitalized on their success by creating a shirt displaying a cartoon bass fish in a Volunteers jersey.

“I saw people posting about it on Twitter, and it was definitely blowing up. And thinking on a basic level like that, of supply and demand, what people want and ‘can we give it to them?’ That was definitely a learning experience,” Thompson said.

Joey Bissing, president of the UT Bass Fishing Team from 2023-24, remembered making a phone call to pitch the CEO, CFO and other executives at Bridgford on sponsoring their team.

“It was kind of terrifying,” Bissing said, “but then it taught me to not be afraid to ask for the moon. You might get the moon.”

The phone call led to a dinner and a meeting between the team’s leadership and Bridgford in Chicago, which Bridgford flew them out for, according to Bissing. Bridgford became the club’s title sponsor — the biggest name on their custom jerseys, the logo displayed on their boats — and received priority recognition among other sponsors on the club’s social media posts.

The members of the executive team are not the only ones learning. Parents, children and fans are learning from the team through social media content such as the team’s regular “tackle tip” posts.

“A lot of our viewers who are engaging with those posts are either parents of young children and trying to get their kids into fishing. People will DM us and ask us for advice on bass fishing, and it doesn’t take any time out of my day to respond, so I try to always help out with that,” Thompson said.

“People tag us in their posts. They’re taking what we tell them and actually using it and catching fish. There’s nothing better than that,” Thompson added.

Domingos said it’s important to him to share his love of the sport.

“I always try to remember that you too were once the kid with all these questions. And, you know, a lot of these kids look up to us, look up to the college guys, just because of what we’ve done with the team,” Domingos said. “… So especially when the youth of the sport is talking to me, I want to try to give my all back to them.”

In the long term, Domingos said that he wants the Bass Fishing Team to become a varsity sport at UT. For example, he said, other colleges provide their collegiate bass fishing programs with boats and transportation to and from competitions.

“We’re right around 50 members right now. This is the biggest the club’s ever been, and with that obviously comes a lot more expenses, traveling expenses, lodging expenses, all of those things,” Domingos said. “So my long-term vision is that we do become a sport with the university and just work hand in hand, trying to promote each other better.”

Domingos said that the best time for prospective members to join is in the fall, which is when the team plans logistics for the year. He invites interested fishers to reach out to any member of the executive team, whose contacts are on the team’s Instagram.

The club will compete again from Feb. 12 to 14 at the Bassmaster College Series national championship at Lake Murray in Columbia, South Carolina.