There’s a version of competitive fishing that looks straightforward on the outside. You practice, you pick your spots, you execute. The best angler wins.
William Crawford has been coaching at the University of Montevallo for eleven years. He’ll tell you that’s not how it works.
“We go in depth in a lot of areas outside of fishing. It creates a certain mindset.”
Crawford came up through college athletics, baseball, before bass fishing. He saw early on that the mental demands are the same. How you channel your thinking when the pattern breaks. How you handle a bad day without carrying it into the next one. How you stay present when the conditions are working against you and the clock keeps running.
“In any sport, it’s about having the right mindset at the right time. That transpires directly into fishing.”
What Crawford has spent eleven years learning to recognize is something harder to quantify: the anglers who have it. The competitive edge that exists underneath the skill. The ones who hate losing more than they enjoy winning. It’s not something you can manufacture through repetition or teach in a classroom. You either see it in someone or you don’t. Crawford sees it.
The “It” Factor
Every elite angler carries something beyond their fishing ability. A quality of presence. A way of approaching a hard day that keeps them inside their process when everyone else starts drifting. Confidence without noise. The ability to fish their own game regardless of what the leaderboard says.
After more than a decade of coaching, Crawford has gotten good at recognizing it. It doesn’t show up the same way in every angler. Some carry it quietly, doing their own thing, unaffected by the weight of the moment. Others carry it through intensity, through a flat refusal to accept that the fish aren’t going to cooperate.
“There’s a certain drive and competitive nature shared between all successful athletes. They hate to lose more than they enjoy winning. You see that in these guys.”
What separates Montevallo isn’t that Crawford finds anglers with this quality and puts them in a boat. It’s that he builds a program around helping them understand what they actually have and what to do with it.
“Help them define their goal, then achieve it. Think less about winning the tournament. Think more about what the long-term future looks like.”
The Partnership
That’s where college fishing becomes something the professional circuit simply can’t replicate.
At the pro level, fishing is individual. One angler, one boat, one result. The relationships are real, but the competition is ultimately yours alone to carry.
In college, you fish with a partner. And that changes everything.
“No one will ever experience something similar in fishing. All working together.”
The best pairs at Montevallo don’t just fish well together. They think together. There’s a flow between them, an understanding of how each person reads water and makes decisions. That same “it” factor exists between partners too. It’s just as hard to explain and just as hard to manufacture. When a pairing works, it feels less like strategy and more like instinct.
Crawford has watched this long enough to know you can’t force it. A pair either has the chemistry or they don’t. Part of coaching is recognizing which combinations unlock something the individuals couldn’t access alone.
“Getting the guys to understand that at the end of the day, if the team is successful, there are also individuals who are successful.”
It’s set up unlike anything else in the sport. When a Montevallo angler qualifies for the Bassmaster national championship, the individual wins and the team’s finish improves with them. Everyone rowing in the same direction. Everyone’s ceiling gets higher because of it.
What Stays With You
Many of these anglers will move on to professional fishing. When they do, they’ll fish alone. No partner to think through a decision with. No team finish to anchor the individual result to. Just them, the water, and whatever they’ve built inside.
That’s what the Montevallo program is actually preparing them for. The camaraderie, the accountability, the experience of fishing alongside someone you trust. That shapes how an angler thinks and how they handle pressure for the rest of their career. You can’t learn it alone. You can only learn it here.
“These young guys are sharp. They’re like a sixty-year-old man in a nineteen-year-old body.”
Eleven years of watching anglers come through a program will do that to a coach. It sharpens the eye. Clarifies what actually matters. Crawford doesn’t measure success by tournament wins alone. He measures it by the kind of anglers his program sends into the world.
Why Simms Is Here
Simms has always backed people who fish to win. Not the loudest story, not the biggest fish. The ones who show up prepared, stay focused when conditions turn, and understand that a long day on the water is earned. Not given.
That’s the Montevallo program. That’s the kind of angler it produces.
