Toledo Bend wasn’t supposed to be about Daylon Milam, Trace Antunes, and Peyton Sorrow.

The headline belonged to Andrew Rickman, who hauled in 95 pounds, 15 ounces over three days at the B.A.S.S. Nation Qualifier there — a number that didn’t just beat the previous Nation record, it buried it. The old mark, 77-6, had stood since Dylan Nutt set it at Pickwick in 2025. Rickman beat it by more than 23 pounds and still had 13 pounds, 8 ounces to spare over second place.

Second place was Milam. Third was Antunes. Sixth was Sorrow.

Turns out the headline belonged to the contingent after all. Rickman fished collegiately himself, at Dallas Baptist, and a tournament that produced six total finishes heavier than the old Nation record came down, top to bottom, to a field stacked with college anglers.

All three are headed to Lake Guntersville this fall for the Ultimate Angler Championship. So is Rickman — that win punched his own UAC ticket — and so is Nutt, the man whose record he broke and the reigning Bassmaster Classic champion, along with his twin brother and fellow qualifier, Carter Nutt. None of the six got there the easy way, and the collegiate ranks are about to show up in force.

The $500 Mistake, and the One That Almost Got Away

Sorrow’s path to Guntersville started with him forgetting he was even in it.

He’d signed up, paid his Unified Pros dues, and moved on with a busy spring — guiding clients on Lake Hartwell back home in South Carolina, finishing up at Montevallo, lining up a transfer to West Alabama for grad school. The UAC verification email landed and caught him off guard. He hadn’t forgotten the tournament. He’d forgotten he’d entered it.

His fishing partner wasn’t so lucky. Sorrow fished Lake Seminole this year with a co-angler named Brady McCormick, who kept meaning to get his own Unified Pros membership squared away and kept putting it off. McCormick never signed up. A $500 mistake locked him out of a half-million-dollar tournament, and Sorrow is headed to Guntersville without him.

Guntersville itself is the thing that has Sorrow’s attention now, and not in a comfortable way. He grew up fishing highland reservoirs, the kind of water where you can look around and get a read on where the fish ought to be. Guntersville doesn’t work that way.

“The only thing I don’t like about the place is how you look around, and it looks like a fish could live in every inch of it,” Sorrow said. “I’m used to these highland reservoirs where you can just about tell where they’re gonna be at. You look at a 30-acre mat, and you have no idea where to even start.”

He’s planning to get up there and pre-fish before the off-limits window closes, and he’s doing it without the tool that’s carried him through most of his college career. LiveScope has been close to mandatory on the college trail — Sorrow puts the number at roughly 75 percent of the time, with the Arkansas River as the exception that proved the rule, four inches of visibility forcing him and a partner to swim a jig blind through grass all day. Guntersville won’t allow electronics for UAC. Sorrow’s banking on a week of pre-fishing to make up the difference.

Joining the Club the Hard Way

Milam’s road to Guntersville ran through a tournament he didn’t get credit for.

In January, he and roommate Trace Antunes won the Alabama Bass Trail 100 opener at Smith Lake — 15.98 pounds through fog, cold water, and a three-hour takeoff delay, good for $25,000 plus an $8,000 Phoenix bonus. Antunes was a Unified Pros member. The win punched his ticket to Guntersville on the spot.

Milam wasn’t a member. Same boat, same fish, same trophy — no invite.

He joined Unified Pros not long after, and the timing mattered more than he could have known. Later on the collegiate trail, fishing the MLF College Fishing National Championship on Lake Murray alongside James Dubose, Milam helped put up 69 pounds, 7 ounces over three days — good for second, just over a pound behind champions Matthew Knopp and Logan Russell of Lander University. Montevallo put three different duos in the top five that week. This time, when the result counted, Milam had his membership in order.

Of his college teammates alone, he counts four or five who’ve already qualified for Ultimate Angler. He won’t be surprised if that number hits seven or eight by season’s end.

“I can think of 4 or 5 college teammates that have qualified for Ultimate Angler, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number at 7 or 8 by the end of the season,” Milam said. “Yeah, we’ll work together as much as the rules allow. It won’t be specifics, but we can certainly break down a lake as a group.”

It’s how this group has operated since Montevallo. Milam, Antunes, and Sorrow travel and fish together, room together, and make a habit of visiting each other’s home water to learn it before they need to. Milam spent time in Texas with Antunes ahead of the Toledo Bend qualifier. The arrangement paid off for both of them.

“College fishing has been an amazing experience,” Milam said. “Getting to travel to different lakes for competition has made a huge difference. We even go to one another’s home lakes to learn.”

Guntersville isn’t entirely unfamiliar ground for Milam — he’s fished it four times as a college angler, and he and Antunes fished an Ikon Tailgate Tour event there together, a result good enough to qualify them for the Ikon Championship even without a win. But comfort is a different question.

“I’m really not a TVA kind of angler,” he said. “I’m more comfortable on deep, clear reservoirs, but I plan to spend a week up at Guntersville prior to the cutoff to get more familiar.”

That week will have to fit into a fall that’s already full. Between now and the end of the season, Milam is also fishing the Ikon Tailgate Tour Championship and the B.A.S.S. Nation National Championship at Lake Hartwell — fitting, given that’s the lake Sorrow calls home.

Two Jobs, One Summer

None of this happens without money, and none of these three are pretending otherwise.

Milam spent his summer working two jobs to keep the fishing season funded — warehouse shifts at Stateline Waterworks during the week, landscaping work on the side. Sorrow guides on Hartwell. Both are transferring to West Alabama for their senior year this fall, part of a wave of Montevallo anglers making the same move, chasing eligibility and a program that’ll let them keep fishing at this level.

Sorrow is doing the math on what a UAC win would actually mean. He’s already said he’s holding off on Opens, Invitationals, and the Pro Circuit until grad school is finished — he doesn’t want his attention split while he’s trying to do both well. A half-million-dollar payday would change that math fast, and he knows it.

Milam and Sorrow won’t be fishing this one in a small crowd. Brody Robison, who lined up alongside Sorrow for that fifth-place finish at the National Championship on Lake Murray, qualified on his own merits as well. So did Gerald Scott Brumbaugh Jr., Michael Markham, Logan Fisher, Scooter Ligon, and Jackson Thomas — different schools, different qualifying paths, same fall plans. Ridge Faircloth and Max Hondorp punched their ticket as a team. By the time the field sets up on Guntersville, the college trail won’t be a subplot. It’ll be most of the story.

What ties this group together is bigger than one tournament or one school. It’s a wave of college anglers who fish each other’s water before they ever fish for money, and who’ll spend this fall on the same leaderboards as multiple Classic champions, and a roster of qualifiers that keeps getting longer the closer Guntersville gets.

Guntersville will sort out who’s actually ready for it. The collegiate ranks are about to find out together.

 

To learn more about the Ultimate Angler Championship, visit theultimateangler.org.