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Bruce: Let’s count her down. Five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to another episode of White Tail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon. Today we have Ryan Woollard, pro with American White Tail Authority. And Ryan has some great stories about white tail hunting and his adventures as a pro with AWA. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan: Hey, Bruce. Glad to be here.
Bruce: Let’s just start with what is American White Tail Authority? And how did you become a pro with them?
Ryan: Okay. American White Tail Authority, it’s a revolutionary show and concept for the outdoor industry. Everyone knows about Bass Masters and how that started was basically with your Bill Dances, your Jimmy Houstons. Some of the really big players that you know about today. The Hank Parker’s and that sort of thing. And they all got together and formed an organization and said, “Who is the best fisherman?” And before that, there was no platform to measure. It was just who told the weekend stories and that was it. So they put the group together and they started competing. And AWA basically follows that same principle. Before now there’s not been a platform to measure somebody’s success except for a buck a year, depending on your state sometimes two bucks a year. But really going head to head with somebody in a competition, and the way this is set up is, it’s kind of evolved a little bit but basically the way that the show is set up is you have ten pros dropped off on a property at the same time, same conditions, and you’re told, “Go scout, you have two or three days to scout. And then you’ll have three to four days to hunt.”
Sometimes these properties are nine, 10, 11-thousand acres. A lot of us don’t hunt that kind of property so we break it down real small and we scout the areas that we think the dear are gonna be based off of topo maps and Google Earth and Bing. And we do our scouting, we hang our stands, and the competition starts. The competition basically is they give you, I think it’s five shells a day. And you can take up to three does and the last two, or the first two, however it falls they want you to save those for bucks. And this is, the show is really geared and based on quality deer management. So we’re always talking about which deer to take out of the herd and why. And we have a point system that’s set up so that when you are, when you’re chasing these animals and you see three does, one of them being mature in a spike, what’s the right thing to do? You shoot the mature doe. You’re gonna get more points for her than you would the spiked buck. I know a lot of people that would have shot the buck just because it’s a buck. But you’d only get seven points, for the length of it’s tines. Whereas you can get 50 points for a mature doe.
And then you get into age structure where the older deer, older bucks you’ll get an extra bonus 100 points if it’s a three-year-old. If it’s a four-year-old you’ll get 200. And if it’s five-and-a-half or older you’ll get 250, I think. So that’s kind of how the show goes and also this is based on technology that was started with our military where we’re using digital cameras as scopes. And whenever you pull the trigger, I mean we’re shooting 20-gauge slug guns. So when we pull the trigger it does go bang and the deer obviously react to it. But that very instant that you pull the trigger the cross-hairs, it takes a still picture of what you’re looking at through the scope. We have video footage of before and after the shot but the cross-hair placement’s very important because we’re talking about ethics of hunting. You don’t take really, really long shots. And we get deductions if you wound the dear it’s not a good kill. But you get 10 bonus points if it’s a perfect broadside. So that’s kind of the basis of the show. And how I got involved with it was I read an article in the local paper, and I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The local paper was speaking about this new company that was starting this show and it explained it a little bit but it was in it’s infancy so I read the article and I thought it was interesting and I kind of dismissed it.
Well they were doing this nationwide Bass Pro Shop tour as well as online applications and interviews. Well I was in my Bass Pro Shop probably four months later and I happened to walk out and someone approached me about if I wanted to be in a competition. I had my bow with me at the time so I thought it’s a 3D archery competition. I said, “Sure.” So I walked around the corner and here’s this big blinged out RV and all the cameras and lights. And I was like, “Oh, yeah. I know who you guys are.” So I sat down and did an interview with them and just had a lot of fun with them. They’re great people. But then again, I just kind of dismissed it. They’re looking for the world’s best 40 hunters in their sight, in their eyes anyways. So I thought, “Well, what are my chances? I think I’m good but there’s never been a way to compete.” So they called me back about two or three months later and let me know that I did qualify in the top 40. So we have regionals which are world qualifier, or world championship qualifications. And the top two from each regional goes to the world finals.
So my regional that year was in the Kiamichi Mountains in very, very Southern Oklahoma. I had never hunted that area. Completely different from where I typically hunt. And again we had three days to scout and I think four days to hunt. After the first two days the competition is cut in half. The bottom five dropped off. So it’s just the top five competing those last two days. And the competition was fierce. I mean these guys, I don’t know how they found these guys honestly. I mean I understand their application process and the interviews, but every single person that’s an AWA pro is a world-class hunter. And to compete with them was just an absolute honor. But they come from all across the U.S. So they had their own tactics and skills and ways they’d done things. And to get them thrown into a completely new property with me and to watch how they evolved as well as myself, and see what tactics they had brought to the table was just really, really cool. So the competition at Kiamichi went really well. It was very neck to neck competition. And after the first two days I think I was in third place. So I made the cut for the last two days. And I’d gone into the last day I was, I believe, still in third.