The sport of tournament fishing is evolving rapidly and, on all levels, from the pinnacle of fishing to the weekend club derby.
While traditional tournament formats are still occurring and popular with anglers, the new live, catch, weigh, release style events, which promote enhanced conservation of a fishery are becoming more and more popular.
The Champions Tour was born in 2017 with the “every fish counts” format, an innovator of this style of event has grown to one of the most competitive and popular tournament circuits in the Midwest.
With its base of anglers from Minnesota, the Champions Tour will be drawing anglers from across the Midwest to join in on this unique style of fishing for the 2020 season.
Enter the Student Angler Tournament Trail (SATT), Minnesota’s largest high school bass fishing tournament organization and the first to use the catch, weigh, release style of events for its young anglers.
Both organizations used previously existing programs to record and track angler catches throughout a tournament day. The organizations though ran into issues along the way, the inability to edit fish entries, the lack of control, and being unable to customize events in the app were drawbacks that the organizations couldn’t deal with so the Champions Tour set out to build something better.
The Champions wanted their “LiveWell” scoring app to be something any user could easily hop on and learn, simplicity on the front end with a user-friendly interface and quickly navigable menu so there was no wasted time for anglers on the water, but fully customizable on the backend for tournament directors and even staff so they could set up their event exactly how they wanted it down to the smallest detail.
Events could be set up to measure fish in lengths or weights, could be tailored to require picture proof of a fish, could require an assigned judge to accept or reject fish entries, and even be automatically programmed to cull out the smallest fish from an anglers bag if a tournament wasn’t participating in an “every fish counts” format.
The SATT put the LiveWell App to use during their 2019 season and provided valuable feedback and testing throughout their tournament season. With events up to 200 teams, boat captains, multiple judges, and teams needing to be sectioned off by schools. Previously this wouldn’t have been possible, but with the LiveWell App it was possible.
Boat captains and students alike were able to quickly navigate the app, take required pictures and submit them to judges in just seconds while also keeping an eye on the live leaderboard to see where they ranked amongst the competition.
The SATT only counts a team’s seven biggest bass and the automatic culling by the LiveWell App played a huge role for teams in saving time by showing them the smallest fish in their top seven. That way they knew if they caught a fish smaller, they could release it without weighing it because it wouldn’t help their overall limit.
SATT student anglers also worked as judges during Champions Tour events and their knowledge of the LiveWell App really shined when officiating for their pros. In the event of a missed entry or mistyped weight, a phone or text to tournament event staff by the official could get it fixed. This way there was never any confusion and results were 100% checked and accurate.
The LiveWell App was built to be used by all, and easily understood by everyone with features unlike any other scoring app on the market. Made to be user friendly and applicable for any type of tournament, from high schoolers to the pros.
The LiveWell App is the future of fishing…
