Record-setting Shaw highlights a strong Toyota Series Championship field

Back in May, Banks Shaw earned a spot at the Toyota Series Championship Presented by Bass Boat Technologies with a win in the Central Division finale on Lake Chickamauga. Of course, it wasn’t just any old win, he won by 24 pounds, 5 ounces, which set a new bar for Toyota Series winning margin. It was the start of an epic summer for Shaw – now, at 21 years old, he’s banked more than $100,000 on the year, won 26 tournaments in a row on Chick, and he and partner Gage King just dropped 28-9 to win the Abu Garcia College Fishing event on his home pond.

Suffice to say, he’s headed into the championship with a full head of steam.

The making of Banks Shaw

Fishing with his father and grandfather, Shaw got his start young, as many passionate anglers do.

“We’d just go bank fish and drag a Texas rig around, things like that,” Shaw said. “And my grandpa, he had a friend that had a pond, and it was just a stocked pond. And I went there, and I just started to catch a lot of fish every time I went. I got hooked on it from then, and I lived right by the lake.”

Able to walk down to the dock to fish whenever he wanted, he was catching bigs at a young age.

“I could walk down and fish at the lake when I could just barely walk,” he explained. “I started to catch some, like, really big bass off the bank and stuff there in spawn. Like, I caught several 10-pounders when I was like 10 years old or around that age, just off the bank on Chickamauga.

“Being able to grow up on a place like that and kinda experience something like that, I really don’t see how you couldn’t just keep on doing it.”

From there, Shaw started fishing on the lake, first in an aluminum jon boat with two trolling motors, then in a G3 with a 90-horse in his teens, and now in a Phoenix, rigged to the nines with all the modern tools you’d expect. Like a lot of young anglers these days, Shaw is in college in large part due to bass fishing. A junior geography major at the University of North Alabama, Shaw hit the books with the intent to bass fish.

“That’s really the only reason I’m even at college, just to fish,” Shaw said. “I knew that I could learn for free pretty much. Our colleges pretty much reimburse gas and lodging and things like that. So, I could go to just anywhere there was a tournament that I wanted to go fish and learn for free pretty much.”

Shaw is part of the wave

If you talk to Drew Gill, who is another transcendent young angler, you’ll likely be convinced that there’s a wave of college talent coming to the upper ranks of fishing. The last few years, with the proliferation of scholarships for fishing and more robust fishing clubs, young anglers are fishing against better competition than ever before.

While the early days of college fishing featured plenty of future pros, it does seem like modern college anglers are more capable than ever of competing at the next level immediately. With folks like Easton Fothergill running wild in the Bassmaster Opens, Gill dominating MLF events, Hayden Marbut winning this winter on Guntersville and Shaw literally setting records, there’s ample proof that anglers in their early 20s are ready to win every time they launch the boat.

After winning a Bassmaster High School National Championship on Chickamauga in 2021 with King, the duo headed to UNA, where they could pay in-state tuition and fish to their hearts’ content.

“There’s no other trail out there that has 250 boats in every tournament where there’s nothing really on the line,” said Shaw of college fishing. “There’s nothing to win in college. So, all these college guys will just go out there and just, like, do their own thing off the wall. And, everybody can always catch them somehow in college.

“I swear, it’s harder to fish against college kids than it is anything else,” he added. “That’s what it seems like.”

Because the rewards in college aren’t massive, Shaw thinks it is a great chance to rely on the entire team, and an opportunity to chase a bite that may not normally be optimal.

“You have a whole team, so it’s not like you’re not just really relying on yourself to catch them,” Shaw said. “You know, some of your teammates are gonna catch them too, so you can just go do your own thing. Like, you don’t really lose anything by wasting time in college. That’s what a lot of people do, and they just figure out stuff that people would never even think of.”

Give a bunch of fishing-obsessed 20-year-olds the opportunity to stay on the water, plus nearly infinite information between the internet and forward-facing sonar, and you’ve got a potent combination. It’s one that has folks like Tucker Smith dropping out of school, Gill finishing his classwork remotely from Tackle Warehouse Invitationals events and Shaw seriously considering putting up the books.

“I’ve been thinking so hard about it,” the college junior said. “Man, I was definitely wanting to finish out college and get my degree, but, like, at the same time, I just want to go fish for more money. I could be a little bit ahead of a lot of people before it gets to where I feel like everybody’s doing the same thing. I feel like I could compete for sure at that level in a lot of places. Since I’m a junior in college, I’ve already pretty much been everywhere and kinda know what everything’s like. So, man, I’ve really been thinking about it.”

Wheeler Lake is up next

Before Shaw becomes a consistent problem in triple-A competition, the Toyota Series Championship is on the docket. While he may have owned Chickamauga all summer, Shaw will now face one of the stiffest fields in bass fishing at Wheeler Lake.

One thing he has going for him is confidence.

“That was the second one I’ve ever fished,” Shaw said of his Toyota Series win. “I know it was on my home lake, but just to know that I could win a tournament like that, it gave me a lot of confidence. And, you know how far confidence goes in fishing.”

From the sounds of it, despite not being as intimately familiar with Wheeler as he is with Chickamauga, Shaw is ready for this one.

“Wheeler’s the only lake on the river that I’ve never been to until, pre-practice,” explained Shaw. “I went there for six days straight. I just know what all the Tennessee River lakes fish like, I knew what to be doing. I knew if I could just go spend more time than anybody else out there in pre-practice, then I felt like I could have a really good shot.

“That’s pretty much what I did,” he said. “I mean, as soon as I got the time, I went out there every day I could before the cutoff and spent as much time as I possibly could. I knew if I did that, I would give myself the best shot I absolutely could.”

According to Shaw, he likes what he found, which could set up a battle royale with some truly top-tier talent.

“It actually set up exactly how I’d like it to,” Shaw said. “I mean, I was catching them exactly how I’d want to be catching this time of the year for the Tennessee River.”

Good news for Shaw, and maybe bad news for the field.