Ryan Suhy and Dante Gramuglia came to competitive fishing in different ways ...
Ryan Suhy and Dante Gramuglia came to competitive fishing in different ways.?Yet now they are in the same boat — at least in their love of the sport.
Ray Suhy had always owned a boat. The family always went camping. So when his son Ryan was old enough to hold a rod and reel, the two went out, father and son, fishing for the Bluegill that young Ryan would first reel in.
As anyone who fishes unsuccessfully knows, the sport isn’t usually exciting. But Ryan found a little bit of luck at a young age, and after catching those first fish, and that first big fish, well
“I got hooked,” said Ryan, a 2009 Kirtland High School graduate, now a senior at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The Suhys moved to Chesterland earlier this year.
That relationship with his dad ignited a passion for the competitive sport he continues today, competing on Liberty’s collegiate bass fishing team.
As for Dante Gramuglia, a senior at Kent State University studying electronic media production — “Honestly, I haven’t heard about it until my roommate got me involved,” he said.
Today he’s vice president of the KSU Bass Fishing Club, started in 2008 by students who enjoy fishing and now more than 30 members strong, from which some students, like Gramuglia, compete in tournaments across North-east Ohio.
Gramuglia, who has also started to fish in bigger tournaments like Fishing League Worldwide (think of the fishing you see weekend mornings on ESPN), grew up involved in the outdoors. He went to Grand Valley High School, but his family moved to Middlefield four years ago.
“I was never huge into bass fishing; I was mostly a trout fisher,” he said. It was his roommate and teammate Matt Holsinger of Massillon who really got him involved. “I just kind of never had the time,” Gramuglia said.
But at the end of his sophomore year, he fell in love with the sport in fishing tournaments, and slowly he obtained the equipment.
Gramuglia tells others who have thought about fishing competitively: “You have to have an experience. Just get involved, and it will all work out.”
Kent State allows the team to use the school’s logo, but the club itself runs on its own.
Last month, both?Gramuglia and Holsinger and Ryan and his partner, Shane Fetty, competed in the Fishing League Worldwide’s Northern Conference Championship tournament on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
But for Ryan, it’s not just a college hobby. He wants to make a career of professional fishing, whether its casting, becoming a sales representative for equipment or marketing the sport.
He’s never tried deep-sea fishing. But naturally he’d like to try that, as well.
“In the early years of high school, I saw there was a collegiate series,” said Ryan, who played four years of the basketball with the Hornets. “How do I get involved in that?”
He contacted the team’s president, who told him the team was just getting off the ground. The president wanted to know if Suhy had a boat. Ryan’s dad did. And soon it was down at Liberty. Ryan met the team, was appointed treasurer and began running the team’s social media.
“Now we tease the new guys that this team was given to us in a shoebox,” Ryan said. “There were some receipts and a little bit of cash and the bylaws of the team. We decided this is how we’re going to build it — literally.
“We went from that to jerseys with sponsors, either through Christian connections or through publicity from companies.”
Liberty’s 40-member club is still for amateurs who just want to come out and fish on Ivy Lake, a 55-acre lake owned by the university that the team has exclusive rights to practice on. But the team also expects to have five boats, two guys per boat, that will be competing in serious tournaments, hoping to reach television and win cash.
Neither team made it out of the Northern Conference, which had a $4,000 reward and berth into the national championship. But it was a great experience.
“What an honor it was to be there,” Ryan said, admitting he was a bit nervous at first. “On the Chesapeake there’s a tidal situation from the ocean, high winds and three- or four-foot waves. It was quite an experience.”
There’s a five fish limit, so the anglers try and catch and keep the five heaviest bass they can. The season has ended but it will begin again in March. Ryan will have a new partner; his graduated.
But it was his first partner — dad — who taught him to catch bass on Findley Lake in New York while camping. It was Ray, who has since moved with the family to Chesterland, who taught his son to fish trout every spring in streams at the family’s cabin in Pennsylvania. Said Ryan, “He taught me everything he knows.”
