Top Ten Fly Fishing Colleges
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Hey guys –
My article on the ‘Top Ten Places to Go to College for Fly Fishermen’ came out in the most recent Fly Rod and Reel ‘Angling Adventures’ issue. This one was pretty much a hoot to write–I tried to spread the love around the country and include schools of different costs and academic rigors; otherwise everything would have been up in the Mountain West.
Pretty sure I’ll get plenty of hate mail on this one. I’ll eventually port it over to this site as well but I like to let the magazines have first bite at the online versions of my stories.
Ahem.
However for the winner I couldn’t resist the SW Montana schools. Greg Thomas (editor of FR&R, not the founder of Wendy’s) insisted we had to add UM as well so he didn’t get strung up in his hometown. 🙂
Overall a fun story and I think a fun read – y’all check it out.
The winner:
Zach
PS That cubicle marker board with river levels is in the Simms factory in their secretarial pool. I was impressed.
It’s not called Trout U for nothing.
Strategy without Tactics is a Slow Route to Victory, Tactics without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat - Sun Tzu
Clark Fork River boarders U of M’s campus. Rattlesnake creek is directly across from it. The Blackfoot is 10 minutes away. The Bitterroot is 20 minutes away. Rock Creek is twenty minutes away…. Bozangeles and that other school don’t even compare, but thanks for letting everyone think so. We will keep our little since of heaven to ourselves! 🙂
Joel
Outside, Forbes, Field and Stream publish this article or something similar every couple of years. However, it is groundbreaking in its own way: Posting pictures… of an article you wrote… containing hero shots… of yourself… on your own web site – holy crap! Now that’s classy. An amazing height of self promotion.
IM PRESS IVE.I’m sorry you didn’t like it Karlin. I enjoyed writing this article and magazines don’t have comment sections. I wanted to share it with my friends here. I’ve written a lot of articles and I rarely post them here, but I thought this one would generate discussion.
Funny that posting the photo of the big striper was ok for the board owner but not the article. I viewed the post as a way to generate interest and comment. One of the few subjects that would produce more good natured trash talking than whose college had the best fly fishing would be one on SEC football. By the way, Go Gators.
I plan on living forever, so far so good.
<cite> @kbilcher said:</cite>
Outside, Forbes, Field and Stream publish this article or something similar every couple of years. However, it is groundbreaking in its own way: Posting pictures… of an article you wrote… containing hero shots… of yourself… on your own web site – holy crap! Now that’s classy. An amazing height of self promotion.
IM PRESS IVE.Kbilcher,
Aren’t you a man of the cloth? Your posts would indicate the exact opposite. Nothing you post has ever been classy. I’m just sayin…It’s true that many magazines periodically run a similar article; however, personally, I would buy this issue to read this article, which is no doubt why the ‘Top X Destinations’ articles are so popular with magazines / publishers – they appeal to readers and they sell magazines. I’m sure that Zach has written the article in a way that makes it (at least relatively) unique.
Zach, on the topic of the actual article, did you limit the Universities to US only, or did you consider international as well? Any saltwater destinations in the mix? And out of curiosity, along the lines of Joel’s comment, what was the justification with Montana State University at #1 over University of Montana? From my perspective, they are similar in regards to academics, local fishing options, culture, location (in a general sense – western MT), etc. It sounds like the proximity of MSU to the fabled waters of YNP, NW Wyoming, and Idaho may have been the kicker?
Tim
Hey Tim –
Like you’d imagine, I wanted to spread the love and the options around quite a bit–and I think I have done that more with this piece than any other I’ve seen, objections like Karlin’s notwithstanding (also I am not aware of any of those magazines actually running Top Ten Fly Fishing Colleges pieces). The only previous incarnation of this one I have seen was a 2005 article also in Fly Rod & Reel, which I didn’t know about until after mine had been published.
That earlier article was a good example of what I was trying to avoid: the magazine was owned, edited and mostly written from the coast of Maine at that point, and something like 8 out of the 10 schools were from northeast of Pennsylvania. Nothing wrong with that area, but there’s a lot going on everywhere, and I also wanted to factor in things like cost of education.
My list included places like San Diego for offshore shark and bluewater fishing, Tulane in New Orleans for redfish, Miami for the Keys, as well as popular northwestern fishing locations like Oregon and the two Montana schools (which we listed at 1 and 1a, incidentally).
As much as we all like casting dry flies at big trout–and Montana has as good a claim as anywhere to the best fishing of that kind–in the last ten years fly fishing really has put down hard roots in other fisheries. We have a shop here in Georgia (Cohutta Fishing Company) which uses the slogan “For the diversified angler” and which mostly caters to striper fishermen, of which there are now enough to keep them in business.
Bottom line is I didn’t want to do just a list of the best places to trout fish in the classic sense; I wanted the parents and kids reading this article for actual advice to be thinking on a bigger scale than that, and also to be happier with the school they might wind up in. There’s lots of great fly fishing everywhere these days. One of my friends even objected that Kansas State wasn’t included! Hahahah.
Zach
<cite> @tim angeli said:</cite> And out of curiosity, along the lines of Joel’s comment, what was the justification with Montana State University at #1 over University of Montana? From my perspective, they are similar in regards to academics, local fishing options, culture, location (in a general sense – western MT), etc. It sounds like the proximity of MSU to the fabled waters of YNP, NW Wyoming, and Idaho may have been the kicker?
Tim
It’s pretty obvious why Zach went with MSU as #1 – We’ve got the shirts and the hats.
Strategy without Tactics is a Slow Route to Victory, Tactics without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat - Sun Tzu
The article title did indicate Fly Fishing and was a fun read.
Anytime Alma Mater comparisons arise you can always expect a certain amount of b@11 busting, no need for ones shorts to get in a twist although I can’t believe you left out my school (one of many actually)……Attachments:
ZM –
I understand you posted photo’s of an article you wrote on your site looking for comments, got it. Comments are what I offered.
I’d be surprised if it was your intention for The Itinerant Angler site to take on a “Zack Matthews Facebook page” type feel. Seriously?
KBI really should just mind my own business but I’m just not built that way.
lbilcher, while you are asking others about their intentions and presuming that you have some kind of hyper intuition, which tells you that it is others that always have self serving motives. May I ask what your are trying to accomplish with the disgraceful bashing? Just seems to me that you don’t maintain this site, pay for any of the infrastructure yet, Zack has always made it open for all to use, with no limitations on posting about some of their own happy accomplishments. So, my next question would have to be: Why would you want me and others to look down on Zack, while looking up towards you for nothing more than attacking his character in open? Am I suppose to believe that you are now better than others and should I check with you to make sure that my posts say nothing about myself?
I think that you are banking on a bandwagon that is shamefully empty and caters to no one. Just saying that your attempt to try and redefine the character of another has only proven to be a catalyst in defining your own. And to answer your last question with the same: Seriously? Here is an idea, build your own forum and after you make a few posts, invite us to come over and attack your character on it…
In point of fact, Karlin, it was my desire to avoid having this site turn into a mere Facebook page which led me to post in the first place. I was somewhat remiss in contributing to discussion here for a quite a while, and as a result the number of people discussing anything fell off to some degree. That was why I went to such trouble to update the board software, and why I have been posting as much as I can–to try to get the ball rolling again.
With respect to Ben’s comments (and others) above–I am not in the habit of banning people. No one in fact is currently banned from using this site. But I am perfectly happy to invite someone to leave. I’ve run and maintained this site at a loss for years now simply because I like to be able to meet all the cool people here and talk about something I love with them. I’ve learned an enormous amount from pretty much everyone who posts here and I value them extremely.
You clearly see this differently. I see no reason why you should continue to make yourself unhappy by visiting this forum. You are more than welcome to contribute any meaningful thing you want, and I am sure it will be well received. But if you have nothing but negative things to say about me personally, my email address is ZachMatthews@gmail.com–please feel free to write whenever you want. In the mean time, I am going to have to ask you to make a contribution of some kind before continuing with these posts.
Zach
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