After founding the Bass Fishing Club, Sacramento State student and club president Stephen Lesieur led his team in competitions, winning a total of $39,000 for the club and Sac State.

Under the leadership of Lesieur, the club has recently won $25,000 after competing at a Western Regional Championship.

Lesieur, senior organizational communications major, was originally looking for a fishing club to join on campus, but discovered that there were no competitive clubs; so he decided to start one. Lesieur founded the Bass Fishing Club on campus last year, which competes in contests at the state and national levels.

“I posted online, checking to see if any students wanted to compete or learn, and took off from there,” Lesieur said. “There was no bass fishing club before. I designed it around competitive fishing, meaning you are going to compete against other schools on the West Coast in a 20-foot professional boat in all sorts of conditions from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s six to eight hours of (competitive) fishing on these boats.”

This appealed to a few students who saw Lesieur’s posting online and joined. One student was Matthew Paul, senior kinesiology major, who had fished competitively prior to joining the club.

“I had fished tournaments with FLW, which had 200 participants,” Paul said. “I had heard about them starting a college thing with paid expenses, traveling around, winning prize money without paying an entry of $300 to $4,000. They were going to pay for gas and not charge entry and you could win money. I didn’t believe it, but on a local online forum, someone from Sac State posted that he was starting a club. I said, ‘what the heck,’ and contacted him, not believing that FLW would be able to do this.”

Chris Wong, senior business management major, shared a similar story about finding the online posting while searching for college fishing tournaments.

“I’d heard about the college fishing tournaments before I heard about the club that was getting started,” Wong said. “I wanted to fish in the college series tournaments, so I did research on Western Bass forums, and Stephen had made a post, trying to get a club to compete. I was the third member to sign.”

After Lesieur gathered members, the club became official and Lesieur became the club president.

Lesieur, who began fishing when he was 7 years old on an 800-yard stretch of the Consumnes River behind his childhood home, said his uncle and grandpa taught him to fish.

“I used to walk miles up the creek all the time when I was younger,” he said.

Lesieur started with general fishing, but eventually settled upon bass fishing.

“When I was young, I fished for trout, did fly-fishing, tied my own flies, and fished for bass at my grandparents’ house,” he said. “I pretty much solely do bass fishing now.”

Lesieur decided that he enjoyed fishing tournaments when he joined a friend who needed a partner for a competition on a whim.

“I started doing tournaments five years ago,” he said. “One of my buddies wanted me to fish a tournament with him, and I hadn’t bass fished in years. I had really gotten into golf. College fishing came after that.”

As a club president, Lesieur’s duties involve putting together all of the club’s traveling arrangements together, keeping current sponsors and getting new ones, and trying to appeal to professors when club members miss class.

Wong thinks highly of Lesieur as the president of the club.

“Stephen fights for us a lot. He does a lot of work,” Wong said. “He’s the best.”

Cole Mayer can be reached at [email protected]