Bass Club Digest

Jerry Cook and Greg Knowles chat with West Alabama Bass Club President Johnny Clark and former President LaVaughn Goodman. Camaraderie is part of the bass club experience. Problem members can disrupt the good times. (Photo by Robert DeWitt)

A group of like-minded people doing something together that they all love; it sounds like a surefire recipe for harmony. And yet when human beings are involved, harmony is never a sure bet.

Bass clubs bring together people who love bass fishing, care about the sport’s future and enjoy some friendly competition. What have they got to argue about? Don’t worry, they’ll find something.

And you can just about bet, when conflicts occur, the same people will just about always be at the heart of the controversy.

“Anybody who is an administrator knows that most of your time is taken up with one or two people who are problem people,” said Hobson Bryan, competitive angler and University of Alabama professor. “In any club of any size there will be some difficult personalities.”

Bryan, who fished for years with West Alabama Bass Club and wrote a scholarly book called “Conflict in the Great Outdoors” said conflict, however infrequent, is inevitable.

“It’s called human nature,” Bryan said. “If you have 30 people in a club, you’ll have two or three who are problem people by virtue of being problem personalities or because they’re mavericks and don’t think like other people.”

Just about anybody involved with bass clubs will testify that, “Ninety-eight percent of the guys in this sport are the finest sort of people you’d ever want to meet.”

“I’m not saying we haven’t had problems,” said LaVaughn Goodman, who served for many years as President of West Alabama Bass Club. “Anybody is going to have problems. But we’ve had very, very few problems over the years.”

But no matter how harmonious a club is just about everybody has witnessed one or two unpleasant situations on the water. There are effective ways to deal with it.

“Some people are always going to be looking for something,” said Dana Beavers, president of Fayette Bass Club, Alabama’s largest bass club. “I don’t understand people like that. They’re usually disgusted or discouraged with themselves and want to take it out on someone else.”

The trick is to keep problem members or situations from becoming the club’s focus. The first step is to anticipate conflict and create ways of dealing with it. And it’s important to understand that conflict can occur over a variety of issues.

For tournaments to go smoothly, members must obey rules of common courtesy during launch, take-off, take out and weigh-in. Members who don’t think the rules apply to them cause problems. (Photo by Robert DeWitt)

A problem member may be a person who simply ignores the rules of common courtesy. Bryan remembers seeing a well-known professional angler fishing on the Harris chain of lakes. The lakes’ locks were small and it appeared that the angler would have to wait to lock through and he wouldn’t get to his spot first.

“He just said ‘wait a minute’ and starting pulling boats apart until he made a place for himself,” Bryan said. He admits that he had to admire the man’s competitive spirit. And the angler got what he wanted.

But in a club setting, other members would resent his action. And were he allowed to get away with it, he’d be tempted to bend and break other limitations. People who push and push often wind up bullies.

“They’ve learned that bullying gets them from Point A to Point B,” Bryan said. “In terms of a bass club where people are trying to get along, it can be very detrimental. It’s the alpha dog trying to be the alpha dog. It’s the individual who always insists in a draw tournament on using his boat.”

People who want to enjoy the club experience and focus on fishing and camaraderie frequently want to avoid conflict. Sometimes they believe they can avoid conflict by giving in to bullying behavior – putting grease on a squeaky wheel so that it doesn’t squeak any more.

But that’s likely to do little more than defer conflict until later and can actually increase the amount of conflict.

“The bully just keeps at it,” Bryan said.

Most boys know that the only way to deal with a schoolyard bully is to stand up and sock him in the mouth. That’s usually not practical or even warranted with a club bully. But Bryan suggests doing the figurative equivalent.

“You don’t want to orient the club to defending it from that kind of behavior,” Bryan said. “You have an apparatus in place to handle it. You don’t give these people a lot of play. You say, ‘that decision’s been made’ and you cut them off.”

Goodman believes two things contributed greatly to his club’s harmony. First, he had a 10-member board of directors who had the final authority in all decisions. And second, the board stuck to the rules it made — without wavering.

“If there’s a problem and anybody has a grievance, they take it to the board of directors,” Goodman said. “As long as you’ve got one set of rules for everybody to go by and you go strictly by the rules, everybody shakes hands and goes home afterward.”

The club got to that point by making sure it paid attention to detail when it made the rules.

“They go strictly by the by-laws,” Goodman said. “We have just about every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed.”

That’s been particularly important in settling conflicts over where tournaments are held, Goodman said. Where the club will fish is probably the biggest source of conflict West Alabama dealt with, he said. People have varying opinions about where they want to fish.

But the club has a clear-cut way to make that decision. And once it makes the decision, the discussion ends there.

Having a board also keeps conflicts from becoming personal. Bryan said it’s important to diffuse the responsibility. If one person, such as a president, makes all of the decisions, members will wonder whether it’s being handled with fairness and impartiality. A board seems more representative.

“It would just be too much for one man or one person to handle,” Goodman said. “He would be trying to please somebody. These 10 guys we’ve got, they’ll try to please you but if it’s out of bounds, it’s just out of bounds.”
Fayette Bass Club diffuses the responsibility for conflict resolution even more widely. If there’s a complaint about a rule, it’s handled at the general membership meeting.

“I think that’s the way things should be handled,” Beavers said. “The majority of the club decides on rules changes.”

Again conflict resolution appears less arbitrary when more people are involved.

If a problem happens at a tournament and needs immediate resolution, the club’s officers handle it. The club votes on officers every December so if they don’t handle problems fairly, they can be replaced.

Even with good mechanisms for handling conflict, some members can be chronic complainers. Goodman said the membership has ways of dealing with that.

“Somebody will just pull them off to the side and talk to them and it never has to go to the board of directors,” Goodman said. “They’ll say, ‘If you’re not happy, well, bye.’”

Sometimes problem members just want to be heard. Beavers said you couldn’t underestimate the power of listening.

“Listening is very important,” she said. “You have to let them get it out in the open. You talk to them and by the end of the conversation they’ve calmed down and you can get the problem addressed.

Members have to use caution when they intervene either formally or informally. And it becomes doubly tricky when the behavior in question is cheating. Club tournaments don’t involve a lot of money but cheating still happens.

“People assume that it’s big-money tournaments that people cheat in,” Bryan said. “But people will cheat for a trophy. We all want to be special and one way to achieve specialness is accomplishments.”

It’s not all that hard to pick up on some forms of cheating. Stringer weights well beyond the norm for a fishery usually raise eyebrows. If one angler or pair of anglers suddenly start winning tournaments by large margins alarm bells go off.

Polygraph tests, often used in money tournaments, aren’t very practical for club tournaments, so clubs must look for alternatives. Draw tournaments can be a big deterrent to cheating.

But there are other, more subtle forms of cheating. Bryan notes his experience while fishing in a tournament on the Alabama River. His boat is a pretty fast, running around 70 mph. Yet several anglers blew by him like he was standing still.

Bryan believes it’s unlikely that a boat with a stock engine could run 15 to 20 mph faster than his boat. Modifying engines is against B.A.S.S. rules.
His dilemma then becomes whether to file a complaint. The complaint would almost certainly create animosity between him and the other angler. And he runs the risk of falsely accusing a fellow angler of cheating. That’s not something most people take lightly.

Mechanisms that shift the burden for revealing cheaters from individuals to the club or club governing body are desirable. These mechanisms can help avoid personal conflicts within the club.

Goodman remembers a time during the early 1970s when people were trying all kinds of ways to cheat. Tournament managers found ways to deal with it. Among the most effective cheating deterrents is peer pressure, he said.

“The people fishing these tournaments are generally good sportsmen,” Goodman said. “If somebody gets in there and does something wrong and the fishing community finds out about it, he’s blackballed from everything.”
Fear of being cut off from the sport is a strong deterrent to all kinds of bad behavior. Even bullies, malcontents and cheaters understand that. Perhaps that’s why they’re generally few and far between in club fishing circles. Wise club members will take the steps to make sure it stays that way.

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