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By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune October 03. 2014 2:00AM Local bass champ looks to continue his rise Mark Freeman Jacksonville's Jacob Wall hopes a little frog in his tackle box will help him become the new prince of West Coast collegiate bass anglers. Wall and teammate Kyle Schneider will be representing the University of Oregon next week in a two-day invitational tournament at California's bass mecca at Clear Lake in their quest to become national college bass-fishing champions. Wall plans to attack Clear Lake's shallows with his trusty frog patterns and other swim baits in hopes of catching what he believes will be 50 pounds of bass or more to win the two-day event that starts Oct. 11. "And if that doesn't work, we'll go deep," says Wall, who will turn 20 on the event's second day. Wall and Schneider used similar tactics to win a tournament last year in Arizona to qualify for this Western Conference Invitational, put on by Fishing League Worldwide, or FLW, as part of its college bass-fishing competitions. Winning a one-day event is part luck, Wall says. Ending up on top after two days is another matter. "I really think this Clear Lake event will show who shines," Wall says. "It'll show who can withstand the pressure of two days of competition. "This will prove who's the top stick in the West," he says. In order to make the sixth annual national championship scheduled next spring at Lake Murray in South Carolina, Wall and Schneider together must finish in the top 10 of the 45 qualified teams. The Western Conference winner also will earn $4,000, which will go to their college bass club to defer future tournament expenses. "This is a pretty big event for us," Wall says. "Hopefully we can continue our success and win." FLW's collegiate tour is a relatively new entry in bass angling's competitive hierarchy. The tournaments are free, and all participants must be full-time undergraduate students at a four-year college or university and members of a fishing club recognized by their school. Bass fishing is a club sport at Oregon as well as Oregon State, which is sending two teams to the Clear Lake event. Wall was a freshman and Schneider was a senior when they teamed together for Oregon for the first time in a qualifying tournament last spring at Arizona's Lake Havasu. The pair had just five bites all day and boated just three fish. But their collective weight of 12 pounds, 8 ounces beat the second-place team from Chico State by nearly 3 pounds, and they won $2,000 for their club. Wall's plan for Clear Lake jives well with Walmart FLW Tour bass pro Mark Daniels Jr., of Fairfield, California. Daniels tells participants to first look for fish in water 5 feet or less around the lake’s abundant grassy areas, tossing topwater frogs, jigs and swimbaits. If the weather gets nasty, Daniels says to fish the deepwater rock piles with crankbaits or jigs. Similar tournaments are scheduled for four other regional locations. Though it's perhaps the most prestigious tournament to date for Wall, he is used to bass-fishing pressure. Even as a 12-year-old bass-fishing prodigy, Wall knew all those practice casts on his family's Jacksonville driveway would one day turn into cash. For hours after school, Wall would practice pitching or flipping jigs onto plastic targets stapled to pieces of plywood, emulating casts he'd seen on televised bass tournaments and believing that one day he'd be that guy. In 2007 he earned a trip to the finals for the national Bassmaster CastingKids competition, then he returned the following year and won it all. In 2011, he and former partner Colby Pearson won the first Oregon high school championship and ended up second in the national high school bass championships. He was the only teenager to fish in FLW's Everstart Series event in 2013 on California's Sacramento River Delta. Wall foresees a future as a tournament pro, but he's studying visual arts as a fall-back plan to work somewhere in the fishing industry should his dream fall a few casts short. A victory on Clear Lake and a trip to South Carolina would go a long way toward building that resume. "At this point in my career, I want to get as many wins and titles as I can," Wall says. "I think it would show companies and sponsors that this kid started, basically, at the bottom at 12 years old in casting competitions and worked hard and stuck with it on every level." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected]. Follow him at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman. http://www.mailtribune.com/article/20141003/NEWS/141009955 © 2015 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->