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Briarwood’s bass fishing team secured its second-straight state championship after it placed three boats in the top four, including state champions Knox Jones and Rock Fulton, and secured three national qualifiers. (Contributed)

By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

LAKE MARTIN – After Briarwood Christian School’s bass fishing team snapped a multi-year title drought in 2024, it didn’t let its grip on the hot seat slip in 2025.

Briarwood repeated as state bass fishing champions on Saturday, May 3 at Lake Martin, claiming the individual and team crowns after a dominant season on the water.

“It’s amazing,” Briarwood coach Josh Jones said. “To watch these guys transition from rebuilding their team over the last couple years and now to get into a phase of reloading their team, it was just truly incredible to watch them be able to execute at a very high level.”

The Winning Edges capped off the season by placing first, second and fourth at the state championship, coming just one point shy of making history as the first team to sweep the state finals.

Seniors Knox Jones and Rock Fulton took home the individual title, riding a 5.69-pound bass on day one to the top of the leaderboard. However, Briarwood’s junior boat was just behind them as David Campbell and Carter Fountain secured big bags on both days to get in second place.

That set up a memorable moment to end the tournament as Campbell and Fountain sat in the hot seat with the lead while Jones and Fulton weighed in their day two total. The juniors yielded the throne to the seniors to seal the one-two finish.

“It was a really sweet time to watch these four guys that are very good friends kind of embrace each other when Knox and Rock weighed in their bag to take over first place and we kind of knew that we had first and second locked,” Jones said.

However, Briarwood also capped off a season-long youth movement when eighth graders Frank Faulkner and Hudson Smith grabbed third place.

After earning a 5.55-pound first day, Faulkner and Smith vaulted up the standings in day two to finish with 13.21 pounds, just six ounces shy of third place and a clean sweep of the podium, but the result did help clinch the team’s state championship.

Finishes like those make Jones confident about the future of the program.

“For our younger guys that have come along, they have felt the really just the joy of being able to perform, and now they have that confidence,” Jones said. “It’s like, ‘Oh the mountain’s not so steep, we’ve done it before.’ If we continue to push in our current work ethic, we will be able to do that again in 2026.”

The state championship came after a dominant season where Briarwood placed second in the season-opening tournament in Guntersville and continued to build momentum from there. The Lions entered the state championship with a 23-point lead, something they didn’t expect going into the year with a young group.

Jones attributed that hot start to a focus coming into the year to reload instead of rebuild as well as a strong foundation of communication at the start.

“It was really cool to see some guys with new partners this year really kind of gel quicker than normal, and so I think a lot of that is just guys spending time together fishing outside of tournaments and practicing,” Jones said. “It was an incredible experience to watch them execute at a high level throughout the whole season.”

Now, Briarwood’s top three boats will turn their focus to the B.A.S.S. High School National Championship this July at Clarks Hill Lake in Georgia. Jones and Fulton, Campbell and Fountain and the eighth graders Faulkner and Smith will take on some of the top boats from around the country.

Jones said it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to have three boats from the same school go and compete and that the anglers are excited to head to Georgia.

“There’s no greater feeling in the world of fishing to be able to go to the national stage,” Jones said. “They’ll be competing against potentially 600 other anglers in that tournament, and so to kind of put in perspective, we competed against 200 in our state tournament for the state championship, and now to be able to go to that next stage of competing against guys from California to Florida, it’s incredibly special.”

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