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The very best college anglers in the world are being tested this week on Leech Lake for the 2026 Strike King Bassmaster College Championship presented by Bass Pro Shops. These 250+ anglers hailing from 56 colleges are no strangers to challenging curriculums or bringing big limits of bass to the scales.

They proved this fact during day one of the National Championship and they displayed a compelling conflict taking place on Leech Lake for this tournament; smallmouth versus largemouth. After day one, a limit of five smallmouths sat atop the leaderboard, but the second-place bag consisted entirely of largemouth.

Leech is the third largest lake in Minnesota and there are fish in just about every corner of the 112,000-acre fishery. While most tournaments have been won with smallmouth in recent years, it’s clear that Leech Lake does not give up her bronze gold easily.

Quade Lobo and Jerry Brumbaugh are seniors at Adrian College who captured nearly 19-pounds of Leech Lake smallmouth to finish day one in 8^th place. Though their Alma Mater is in the neighboring state of Michigan, it was still a 13-hour haul from campus to Walker, Minnesota. They may attend a northern school, but you could hardly call them locals.

Still, Lobo who studies Business and Biochemistry, and Brumbaugh majoring in Business Administration felt they had a solid grasp on how Leech Lake set up for this tournament. The Adrian College Bruisers started practice with a gameplan and, so far, their strategy is working as intended.

“Smallmouth seem to be less in numbers on Leech but they are bigger on average,” Brumbaugh explained. “Coming into practice, we thought you’d need smallmouth all three days to have a shot to win. We did a little largemouth fishing in practice, but not much. Honestly, we thought the weights would be way higher than they were (on day one), which is why we strictly targeted smallies. We’re right where we need to be!”

Smallmouth may be the main character for many teams this week, but they aren’t the only star of the show. Shorelines and shallow bays are full of grass, reeds, lily pads, docks, and other shallow cover perfect for the healthy population of largemouth found in Leech Lake. According to the college competitors, largemouth bites were easier to come by in practice, but a lack of consistent quality was a constant theme.

Easton Drennon, a junior at Carson-Newman University studying Exercise Science and his partner Chase McCarter, majoring in Business, drove up from Tennessee planning to ignore smallmouth and target something a little more familiar to their southern roots.

Like many of their peers, the duo was plagued with below-average largemouth bites until their final day of practice when they stumbled onto a special area. This spot produced over 22-pounds for the Carson-Newman Talons, which earned them 2^nd place.

“Coming into this tournament we knew our strong suit would be on largemouth, not chasing smallies offshore,” Drennon said. “We committed to searching for largemouth in practice. We found lots of fish the first few days, but struggled finding quality. On our last day, we located three areas with quality and quantity. Today (day one) was promising, but anything can happen. We’re going to chase greens all week and if any big wind or weather rolls in, maybe that’ll work in our favor.”

Mother Nature and more specifically, wind speed and direction, are always part of the equation when bass tournaments are held on big bodies of water this far north. In the event of inclement weather, a largemouth strategy could pay off immensely.

The team of Jaxson Freeman and Evan Sutton, who represent McKendree University in southern Illinois, weighed over 21-pounds of smallmouth on day one. They are well aware of the factors swirling around weather, green bass, or brown bass this week, but they still opted to disregard largemouth entirely.

Both McKendree Wildcats are fifth year seniors, and they ended day one in fifth place. Freeman, who’s earning a Business Marketing degree, and Sutton, a double-major in Computational Science and Mathematics believe smallmouth are key to excelling in this tournament.

“We came into this tournament thinking smallmouth would dominate unless the wind really blew and messed up the offshore bite,” Sutton offered. “We only targeted smallmouth in practice; we didn’t even mess with largemouth. There’s not a ton of smallmouth in Leech Lake, but there are big ones. We’re trying to win and make it to the Classic Bracket, which to us, meant we needed to commit to smallmouth.”

With two days remaining, the Championship lesson on Leech Lake is far from over. Whether the eventual champions target bronze backs or green bass one thing is certain, they’ll need three days of heavyweight stringers to rise to the top of this class.