Hayden Barnett (left) and Camdyn Cranfill of the Kingston Fishing Team
BY DAVE LINK
Camdyn Cranfill and Hayden Barnett are ready for the next stages of their bass fishing careers, but not before one last go-around as co-anglers for the Kingston Fishing Team.
They will fish in the Bassmaster High School National Championship on July 31-Aug. 2 at Clarks Hill Lake (Ga.), capping an outstanding 2024-25 season for KFT.
Barnett, a 2025 Kingston graduate, and Cranfill, a rising senior at Kingston, clinched the Tennessee Bass Nation’s Southeast championship in May and earned Co-Anglers of the Year for the TBN’s Southeast Division out of 202 angling teams.
Kingston won the team championship.
Barnett has signed to fish for the Carson-Newman Eagle Anglers, while Cranfill will be looking for a new co-angler at Kingston in 2025-26 – and a fifth straight trip to the high school nationals. He’s going for the fourth time this summer.
“Next year will be my senior year,” Cranfill said, “and I’m hoping to have a great year.”
It won’t be easy topping the 2024-25 season with Barnett.
In their four tournaments counting in the TBN Southeast points standings, Barnett and Cranfill posted three first-place finishes (Watts Bar, Cherokee, and Nickajack Lakes) to go with a fifth-place finish.
Their points lead when they took off at Ladds Landing on Watts Bar in May was almost insurmountable.
“Going in,” Barnett said, “we knew that we would have to basically zero to get beat in the points, and Watts Bar is my home lake, and I’m pretty good on Watts Bar. I just had a feeling it was going to be hard to beat us in the points with it being here.”
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WINNING WATTS BAR
And it didn’t take long for Barnett and Cranfill to get it going on Watts Bar.
“It was a great day,” Cranfill said. “We started off strong with a limit of smallmouth for probably 15 or 16 pounds, and then throughout the day, we caught some largemouth and culled, and at the end of the day, in the last hour, we pulled up to a place and Hayden caught like a (5.91-pounder).”
Barnett caught the big largemouth on a damiki rig jig, fishing at mid-range depth.
“That made our day, completely,” Barnett said.
Barnett’s late catch lifted the KFT anglers to the title, giving them 20.31 pounds including the 5.91-pounder.
They won by less than a pound over Rhea County’s Blake James and Turner Tharpe (19.97 pounds, 5.37-pounder), ahead of third-place Hunter Owens and Clayton Kelley of Karns (18.6 pounds, 4.01-pounder), fourth-place Elias Hitson and Bradford Van Demark of Eagleville (15.87 pounds, 3.11-pounder) and fifth-place James Lane and Jackson Daugherty of Kingston (15.11 pounds).
Cranfill said they switched baits during the day.
“We threw a crank bait quite a bit,” he said. “We threw a Carolina rig quite a bit. We threw a jig, just alternating that kind of stuff. We caught the smallmouth early on a crank bait and then later in the day we caught some better largemouth on a jig.”
Their boat captain was Barnett’s father, Kelly Barnett, although Cranfill’s father, Hagen Cranfill, has also captained their boat during the season. Barnett is coach of the Kingston Fishing Team.
“They help out tremendously as far as funding goes,” Cranfill said, “but we put in the practice all week by ourselves, and when Kelly gets in the boat, or my dad gets in the boat, normally they don’t have an idea of what’s going on. We just tell them where to go, where to take us, what we’re doing and stuff like that the morning of the tournament.”
The Kingston Fishing Team after winning the TBN Southeast Division Team Championship on Watts Bar Lake.
WHAT’S AHEAD
Barnett will team up next season at Carson-Newman with Hunter Owens, a 2025 Karns graduate and highly successful high school angler with Kelly.
The Barnett-Owens partnership won’t be new.
“Me and Hunter fish super good together, we really do,” Barnett said. “We’ve fished together since last July and our worst finish in an adult tournament is ninth, and the rest of them, we’ve either won or come in second.”
Barnett’s co-angler at Kingston before Cranfill was Will Bacon, a 2024 Kingston graduate and current Carson-Newman golfer.
Cranfill, meanwhile, previously fished at Kingston with Owen Ray before partnering with Barnett as a sophomore.
“Trying to figure each other out was kind of hard,” Cranfill said, “but we figured it out at the end of last season, like what we needed to do and how we would go into a tournament, and this year it’s been smooth sailing. We’ve had a great season.”
And it’s not finished.
They’ll head to Clarks Hill Lake in late July, hoping for a better finish than last year’s nationals at Chickamauga Lake.
Clarks Hill Lake is in Evans, Ga., east of Atlanta and south of Greenville, S.C.
“Last year it was on our home lake (Chickamauga) and we didn’t do too good,” Cranfill said. “It got in our heads. But it’s always fun to compete against the best kids in the nation and have a chance of doing something big like that. And it’s definitely fun, going to a lake we’ve only been to one time. It’s great for learning.”
Barnett hopes they learned a lot last year during a trip to Clarks Hill Lake for a tournament.
“We were down there last March,” Barnett said. “We had a super good practice. We were on them pretty good, and then a cold front came through the day of the tournament and it got real crappy real quick. But I like that lake. It’s a fun lake.”