When I’m practicing for an upcoming tournament, there are a couple of important things I take into account. For one, there’s the body of water I’m fishing. Is it a Lake Guntersville, or a Beaver Lake? If I figure it’s going to take stringers of 3- to 5-pounders, as it would on Guntersville, I go through as many fish as I need to until I reach that size range. Then I leave them alone, make note of where they are and what I caught them on, and go find some more like that somewhere else.

If I’m fishing a tough lake like Beaver Lake, I’m just looking for keepers and I’ll shake them off instead of bringing them to the boat. I’ll try soft-plastics with screw-in locks and no hooks, and topwater lures or crankbaits with the hooks cut off at the bend; I don’t remove the hooks because it changes the action. The goal is to just draw good strikes and find fish, not to catch them.

Another thing to consider is the size of the fish when there seem to be lots of them around. In a tournament, you don’t want to waste a lot of time fooling with smaller fish. Say I’m on structure and find a big school. I don’t want to weed through 10 fish to catch one good one, so I might experiment with lure selection to find something that only the bigger fish are going to eat.

Most of the time, how you fish in practice goes a long way in determining how you’re going to do in the tournament.

National Guard Pro Brett Hite, Phoenix, Ariz.