Joppa's bass fishing team is only in its second year, and it already has a waiting list problem — nine or ten students, two boats, and a rotation system that means not everyone gets to compete every tournament.

Braden Ford, a sophomore, missed the first tournament of the season because it wasn't his turn.

"I wasn't losing my turn to go," he said. He'll be in the next rotation.

The team competes in organized tournaments against schools across Southern Illinois — Pinckneyville, Newton, and others — on lakes throughout the region. The format is catch and release. Coaches drive the boats and take two students at a time. Before each tournament, the team pre-fishes the lake: scouting locations, studying conditions, and figuring out where bass might be holding.

The first tournament this season was held at Lake of Egypt. Freshmen Ava Cladis and Tim Smith were partners.

It was Tim's first time on that lake. He caught two bass. One measured barely under the legal tournament length limit. The other was right on it. One counted.

Ava caught a crappie and a bass, but lost a few along the way.

"I only caught a crappie and a bass, but I lost a few," she said.

That's fishing. Sometimes they cooperate. Sometimes they don't.

All three students grew up fishing — with parents, with grandparents, on docks and in boats across Southern Illinois. When the school announced it was forming a competitive team, the reaction was immediate.

"I wanted to join as soon as I heard," Ava said.

She's currently the only girl on the team. It doesn't seem to bother her. What occupies her mind is a scheduling conflict: softball season overlaps with fishing season, and she hasn't decided which way she'll go.

"I don't know if I'm going to do fishing or softball," she said.

Ava moved to the area from Jackson, Tennessee, when she was young. Tim and Braden are from here — the kind of here that's hard to explain to outsiders. When asked how he'd describe Joppa to someone he met on vacation, Braden was practical.

"I just tell them, you know, Paducah, Kentucky? We live on the other side of it," he said.

If the person he's talking to is from around here, he doesn't have to explain at all. "Most of the time I talk to people, they already know about it," he said.

None of the three has a career plan yet. They're a freshman and a sophomore. When asked, Tim and Braden had the same answer: not yet. No anxiety about it. Just honest.

The team has shirts. Tim reports that they feel "pretty sweet." Spectators can't watch the competition itself — the boats are scattered across a lake — but they can come to the weigh-in, which is where the results become real.

When asked what they'll remember about Joppa years from now, Tim was the one who answered.

"What's changed?" he said. "And how life's been."

For a freshman on a bass fishing team in a town most people locate by its proximity to Paducah, that's a pretty good place to start.