North by Northwestern

You've probably never heard of Northwestern's most recent championship team. The two-man band doesn't play on the gridiron, hardwood or diamond. It doesn't garner media attention, spectators or even school funding.

It just wins.

Weinberg juniors Matt Kestufskie and Jimmy Morrow of the Northwestern Bass Fishing Team won the Forrest L. Wood College Fishing Central Region Championship Saturday, earning a birth in the college fishing national championship, $25,000 in prizes and a new boat. FLW is the premier tournament fishing organization in the country.

The pair founded the club fishing team two years ago as part of the NU Sportsman's Club. And since then, they've traveled across the country to fish bass, rack up tournament victories and donate more than $14,000 of their winnings to the university.

North by Northwestern sat down with Kestufskie Thursday night to talk about the thrill of victory, gaining a reputation for winning and what, exactly, it is that makes fishing so hard.

NBN: I understand that your victory last weekend came as a surprise. Why was that?

MK: It was a pretty unbelievable tournament. We only caught five fish total, and we could have caught 15 fish over three days. We didn't even catch a fish on the final day.

We were in the lead going into the third day, and we knew we just needed one fish to win. Then I lost two fish in the span of 15 minutes. It was the most depressed I've ever been. We were really pissed because we thought we lost it.

After the tournament, we drove all the way back to the weigh-in station for the final results. We're pretty good friends with most of the other teams out there at this point, but we didn't say a word to each other [or] any of them. [We were] so angry.

We knew that we were ahead of second place by two pounds and eight ounces...and then we saw that the other four teams behind us only had one fish each.

Second place's fish ended up weighing two pounds and four ounces. We won by a quarter of a pound. That fish was one meal away from beating us.

NBN: Why did you start the Sportsman's Club — and consequently the Bass Fishing Team?

MK: My freshman year, Jimmy [Morrow] and I were both in a freshman seminar about fly fishing. We started talking and both loved fishing...and then we heard about these FLW fishing events for colleges. Northwestern was the only Big 10 school not competing in them.

We got a sponsor and founded the NU Sportsman's Club as an umbrella organization for the fishing team. [The Sportsman's Club] is devoted to hunting, fishing and conservation.

NBN: Fishing seems easy enough. Can you convince me otherwise?

MK: It's like any other problem. There are a ton of variables: behavior of fish, time of year, weather, lake conditions, depth, wind, color of the lure, size of [the] lure, presentation of the lure.

You have a basic idea for what fish's behavior patterns are — that gives you a foundation. From there, it's a process of elimination from experience and what you've read from fishing magazines and TV shows.

Fishing is like professional poker. It seems like it's all luck but then you see the same five guys at the final table all the time.

NBN: If you could go anywhere in the world to fish, where would you go and why?

MK: If I could fish anywhere for bass, I would want to go to Lake El Salto in Mexico. The growing season is really long and the fish get huge. It's either there or the Detroit River.

If I could fish for anything else, I'd fish El Tucanare, or peacock bass. It's a bass that lives in the Amazon River Basin. They're brightly colored, they fight really hard and they're so much bigger than the fish here.

NBN: You got your first major tournament win under your belt. What does this mean for your club and where do you go from here?

MK: Because we won this tournament, we qualified for the 2012 FLW College Fishing National Championship. We've heard a rumor that it's going to be in the Southeast United States. The atmosphere should be amazing: huge stage, all indoors, fireworks.

As for our club, I don't think Northwestern got the respect it deserved in the fishing community until now. They were calling us "Northwestern State" which is a completely different school. I don't think they'll make that same mistake anymore.