Lintner Hit Some Rough Spots In 3rd Elite Series Season

Jared Lintner's 2008 Bassmaster Elite Series season wasn't terrible by any means. He ended up 47th in the Angler of the Year (AOY) race, which was several spots above the midway point, and he cashed checks in more than half of the tournaments (six of 11).

But he didn't post the high finishes that he'd logged during his first 2 years on the circuit, and thus his final position in the points race left him 10 spots on the wrong side of the cutoff for the 2009 Bassmaster Classic. For the first time, he's gone into an offseason with frustration as the overriding sentiment for the year gone by.

"I really don't have an excuse," the 34-year-old Californian said. "It seemed like after Florida, I got into a bad groove. It got to the point where every time I got a good bite, somehow, some way, I'd lose it.

"Toward the end, I'd get (a quality bite) and I'd be thinking, Okay, how am I going to screw this up? You can't fish like that. Everybody says forget about the past and go on, and that's easy to say but very difficult to do. The past can haunt you at times."

Smooth Sailing to Start

Lintner, who qualified for the inaugural Elite Series season in 2006 through the now-defunct Bassmaster Western Opens, quickly proved he belonged at the sport's top level. He won the BassFan Rookie of the Year (ROY) award that year after a campaign that included eight made cuts (50th place or better), including four Top 20s, and an 18th-place showing in the AOY race.

He followed that up with an even stronger sophomore campaign. Buoyed by a schedule that made an early swing through his home state, he finished 16th or better in each of the first four events and went on to secure nine checks and a final placement of 5th in the points chase.

Those high finishes are conspicuously absent from this year's ledger, though – his best was a 22nd at Clarks Hill. He might've made his third straight Classic with a strong outing in the season finale at Oneida, but he could do no better than 62nd. When it was over, he'd fallen from 17th in the BassFan World Rankings all the way to 54th.

He said that throughout approximately 25 events in '06 and '07, he lost a total of two fish that would have boosted his ultimate placement in a tournament. This year there were four – all in separate events – that wiped out his chances of making the Top 12.

"And to compound that, some of the decisions I made were pretty stupid," he said. "I've won Opens and pro-ams and things like that in California, and there were times I took gambles to win.

"But if you gamble and lose in a pro-am, you can still salvage a decent finish. But (on the Elite Series), everybody's so good that they'll just crush you. I put myself in some positions that I shouldn't have. But at the same time, if one of those decisions had paid off and I'd won the tournament, it'd be the most brilliant decision I'd ever made."

More Forethought Needed

The event at Alabama's Wheeler Lake in early June could have gone a lot better for Lintner if he'd considered all the possibilities. But a fateful move in practice got him locked on to a narrow-minded approach, and the result was a 75th-place finish.

"I'd never been there before, but everybody told me to fish the flats for the 3 practice days and find a couple of grassbeds, and you'll do well. I did that, but then on the last day of practice I went way up one of the rivers and only got four or five bites in a short time, but they were all 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 pounds.

"I started thinking that if I went up there and spent all day, I could win this thing – there was nobody else there. So I ran all the way up there, but I didn't take into consideration that they might not be drawing any water to generate current. I didn't catch a fish."

He came back to the main lake and caught a miniscule limit (6-10) that put him in 102nd place in a field of 107 anglers.

"I spent the second day out on the flats and caught 13 1/2 pounds and moved up to 75th. If I'd played it a little smarter and a little more conservatively, I could've gotten a check and made the Classic."

Was it Too Easy?

Lintner said his first 2 seasons on the Elite Series went so smoothly that he might've been too willing to gamble this year.

"I didn't have any real high expectations for those years and I was pretty much surprised by how they went," he said. "Because things had gone pretty well, I might've gotten a little too comfortable chasing the win this year.

"It was a really good learning experience. In any sport or profession, you don't learn as much when you're successful as when you're not. At one point I remember telling Denny Brauer that I didn't know if I was going to come back next year, and he told me that I can't let one bad season get in my head like that. Guys like him and (Gary) Klein and (Rick) Clunn – they've all had sub-par seasons and learned from their mistakes, and that made them even better."

In preparation for next year, he plans to pre-scout a couple of the lakes he hasn't been to during the offseason, and also do more map work and Internet research.

"A lot of times I was trying to figure everything out in the first couple days of practice, where if I'd done more of that I'd have been more prepared. I felt like I was more behind the 8-ball than some of the other competitors.

"I'm going to be bummed when the Classic gets close and I know I should be practicing for it, but I'm going to use all that frustration to fuel the fire to help me next year."

Notable

> Lintner said he greatly appreciates the fact that his sponsors have treated him no differently than they did at the conclusion of the previous 2 seasons. "I was kind of worried about it, but he support I've gotten from them has been great. They know what the business is like – you're on top of the world one minute and down at the bottom the next."

> He'll run his father's dairy-products delivery business for about a month this fall so his parents can take a long-awaited vacation to the East Coast. "He deserves it because he's worked so hard for so long."