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Sep 11th, 2007
OceanLED sponsored Team Bandit wins Kingfish Series East Florida points title
Mitchell and his teammates – Richard Ebersold, Richard Stockwell, Sean Cassidy and Dan Baummier, all of Port St. Lucie, Fla. – are now headed to the $275,000 FLW Kingfish Series Championship and $500,000 Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Tour Championship, where the nation’s best kingfish teams will compete for top awards of $70,000 and $150,000, respectively.
Team Bandit captured the Team of the Year title with 426 out of a possible 500 points thanks to a 13th-place finish at the season opener in Fort Pierce, Fla., a sixth-place finish at stop No. 2, also in Fort Pierce, and an eighth-place showing at the third and final stop of the year in Brunswick.
“It’s really awesome to win this,” Mitchell said. “In the past, I have fished a lot of SKA (Southern Kingfish Association) events and been highly ranked in them, but I was truly impressed with the way FLW hosts events.
“Our plans for next year are to get even more involved with FLW. We are going to fish the East Florida Division of the series again as well as all the stops on the Kingfish Tour. We have never won a regular-season event, but we would really like to win one of these championships. It’s more important to me to win a championship than a regular season event. We are going to show up with guns blazing at both of them and hope for the best.”
Mitchell’s team will face the top three teams from each of the 15 FLW Kingfish Series tournaments held in 2007 plus the top 16 teams from each division in the points standings from each of the five FLW Kingfish Series divisions during the three-day, no-entry-fee FLW Kingfish Series Championship in Orange Beach, Ala., Oct. 4-6. From there, Team Bandit will advance to the three-day, no-entry-fee FLW Kingfish Tour Championship presented by BP in Biloxi, Miss., Nov. 2-4, where they will compete against the points champions from each of five FLW Kingfish Series divisions and the top 50 teams in the FLW Kingfish Tour points standings.
Both championships will be featured in one-hour episodes of “FLW Outdoors” broadcast to 80 million FSN (Fox Sports Net) households in the United States and more than 429 million households in such countries as Germany, China, South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, Russia, Hungary and the United Kingdom. This reach makes “FLW Outdoors” the most widely distributed fishing program in the world. Additionally, FLW Outdoors is proud to provide tournament coverage to more than 800,000 servicemembers stationed around the world in 177 countries and aboard Navy ships through broadcasts on the American Forces Network.
Named after the legendary founder of Ranger Boats, Forrest L. Wood, FLW Outdoors administers the Wal-Mart FLW Tour, Wal-Mart FLW Series, Stren Series, Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League, Wal-Mart Texas Tournament Trail presented by Abu Garcia, Ranger Owners Tournament Championship Series, Wal-Mart FLW Walleye Tour, Wal-Mart FLW Walleye League, Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Tour, Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Series, Wal-Mart FLW Redfish Series and Wal-Mart FLW Striper Series. These circuits offer combined purses of nearly $43 million through 241 events in 2007.
Wal-Mart and many of America’s largest and most respected companies support FLW Outdoors and its tournament trails. Wal-Mart signed on as an FLW Outdoors sponsor in 1997 and today is the world’s leading supporter of tournament fishing. For more information about Wal-Mart, visit Walmart.com.
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