Trey McKinney is already one of the best bass anglers in the world, and at just 21 years old, the Illinois native has an incredibly bright future ahead of him. Fresh off his first career Angler of the Year win in the Bassmaster Elite Series, making him the youngest to ever do so, Trey is just getting started.
I caught up with Trey recently to chat about the final stage, winning AOY, fishing for deep Great Lakes smallmouth, his offseason plans, forward-facing sonar, and more. I straight-up asked him if it felt good to silence the haters a little bit with his Angler of the Year win, especially now that LiveScope wasn’t permitted in half the events.
But for the average angler, the weekend warrior just trying to catch bass on their local lake, I asked Trey for the easiest way to elevate your game and take it to the next level. He gave me two straightforward pieces of advice to become a better angler.
The first… it’s all about confidence:
“A lot of people get caught up in wanting to do what everybody else is doing. And it is great because you gotta follow the trends, you gotta understand um some new baits that’s coming along… sometimes that’ll make your life a little easier. Just think about all the people that knew the Coike first, I mean, that was pretty gnarly.
But for me, confidence has a lot to do with it. I’ll tell people this… everybody could tell me what to do, what to go fish, what area they fished and all that, but if I personally don’t have confidence in that, it doesn’t work for me. Like it just, it just doesn’t. Like catching somebody else’s fish is out of my game. Because it just doesn’t work.
I got two people. Rick Cheatham and JT Tompkins is about the only two people that I can be like, ‘okay, if you caught ’em crankin’ secondary points, I know exactly how they done it.’ Just because I’ve spent enough time around ’em, I know the boat, I know how they fish, I know what areas they fish and stuff like that. So I understand it enough that I can go do that.”
He went on to explain that there really is only one way to gain confidence in a technique, and that’s simply to go fish it. And when you master one, you have to try another. It might feel great to be catching them on a wacky rig every single weekend, but if you don’t try something else, you’re never gonna learn anything else. Make no mistake, you will get skunked, but over time, you’ll become a better angler when you can become proficient with more techniques.
“Say that you got this same lake that you’re always going back to and back to and back to. And you know there’s this one good spot, and you go fish it every single weekend, right? But really in the grand scheme of things you’re catching fish, but what are you learning?
So that was the biggest thing for me… I want to take my game to the next level. I just had these little local lakes around the house. I mean, you could fish around it pretty quickly. But I’d always try to fish, every day I went out there I was trying to fish new areas. New stuff, new baits, understanding new ways to catch ’em.
I knew this grass edge here has been good for two weeks, I’ve caught ’em on it every single day. Let’s go find one that’s better. Like let’s go find bigger ones, you know, something like that. So I would always know these spots and find these spots, and I would take the benefit of finding it and the reward, smashing ’em that day, but then the next day, I’m onto the next thing, right? I’m not gonna go back to that same spot. I’m going to try to find something new. Something that’s learning me, something that’s teaching me something.”
Too hard to do? I get it… I get it. It’s hard to bail on good fish just to get skunked learning something new. But there’s one way to force yourself to learn a new technique… just bring one rod with that one bait:
“So honestly if somebody’s just a weekend angler, that’s the biggest thing I can tell ya, is don’t get caught up in so much history, just go fishing. Like, you know, you got a bait that you really want to learn, you got one bait you really want to learn? Take one rod with that one bait.
When you’re not getting bit… you’re gonna figure out how to get bit, or else like, why am I out here? So you’re gonna figure out how to fish that bait to its best ability to get bit, because that’s all you got. And that’s, that’s kind of the cool part. Like certain things of learning and fishing are some of the simplest, but some of the hardest.”
Take notes, people…
Trust me though, it works. When I wanted to get good at flipping a jig in deeper grass, I tied two flipping jigs on two rods, and that’s all I took with me for a little while until I could figure it out. And for a while, I felt completely clueless… just lost out there, it sucks. Now, it’s one of my go-to techniques. When you start to figure it out, there’s nothing quite like that feeling. When it finally clicks… it’s the best.
