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Interviewer: Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous podcast, This is your host Bruce Hutcheon. I am truly excited and frankly honored to have Linebaugh of Trophy Addictions. He is found on the Pursuit Channel on Direct-TV and Dish and he’s got some exciting information that he’s going to share right now about what happened last night. Doug, welcome to the show.
Doug: Thank you, sir, I appreciate it.
Interviewer: Well, tell us what happened last night.
Doug: Well, we’re actually on a featured, one of the small groups that are featured on a show called The Search. It’s on the Pursuit Channel through either Dish or Direct TV, and it’s eight teams vying for a spot, for their own spot, on the Pursuit Channel. so it’s a reality TV show contest. So last night was the second week of the search but it was our first time being featured on there for a video. So our show aired last night. We had a nice watch party and it went really, really well. We had some great sponsors like Moultrie, and Horny Buck Seed Company and those on the social media side, they really shared our page and got us a lot of votes and we’re in it to win it. We’ve got like 12 more weeks and we’ll see who the winner is.
Interviewer: Well, that’s exciting and through our interview today, Doug will be talking more about that. Let’s talk about your passion for whitetail deer in the genesis of Trophy Addiction.
Doug: Well, I grew up on a farm, kind of an odd note to my whitetail adventures. Growing up on a farm, a very large farm, never hunted that much, just never did until I was in college. Some friends of mine started hunting, and to me, I thought it was interesting, so I got into the hunting with deer first and it grew from there. Now we hunt all species, but whitetail has been by far, my all-time favorite. About four years ago, we were approached by a company out of Arkansas to do some filming, and be featured as one of their teams. That didn’t go very well. They never made it nationally. And they were about to go under, so we bought the company and we renamed it Trophy Addiction two years ago. Our whole goal is to video our hunts so that way we can, one day in the future, be on national TV, and that’s where we were last night. Our featured two hunts last night were two whitetail, and in fact, the next two shows we have are going to be whitetail because that’s primarily what we hunt.
Interviewer: Give us a background on how it led up. We got a lot of listeners that’s saying, “Holy fright, national TV. Man, what a goal, what an opportunity.” Let’s unpack the background of really how you get to that point last night where you were on a national platform.
Doug: Persistency. People ask me all the time, “How did you develop this and how did you get to this point?” And I can tell them it’s just being persistent, doing what you love to do, and we’re doing it a little bit different than most people. Most people out there, they think they want to be on TV, or they want to do something special and video their hunts and they dump a lot of money and a lot of time into it, and as you guys know out there in the whitetail world, it doesn’t work out that well.
I manage about 10,000 acres and I killed one deer last year, one whitetail. They put a lot of money and all the efforts into a website and all this and they come out with maybe one or two videos, and it plummets from there. We’ve done it a little bit differently. We actually did it for the fun purpose. And I’ll tell you, if you have kids, that’s kind of what helped us out tremendously in the beginning, because once you record your son’s first kill or your daughter’s first kill on video, and now, instead of going to Grandpa and your friends and your family and telling them story, now you can show them the story and how it unfolds.
I think I’ve seen some of my kid’s footage probably hundreds of times showing it to different people. So once you get that taste for it, then you’re going to do it all the time. But we didn’t do it with an intention of being on national TV like at the beginning. We did it to learn, and so the last three years, we’ve got about, I think, 80 video hunts from Alaska to Africa. And now we’re at a point to where we’re comfortable with what we’re doing and I think what we’re doing is good enough to be on national TV.
Interviewer: Thank you for sharing that. I took some notes and I hope our listeners are, because it’s not easy. It’s never easy to have success. You have to work at it. The part I’m interested in talking more about is the kids. You mentioned them a couple times, just settings of memories forever of your children’s first hunt, first kill, I think people miss that.
Doug: Yeah, and that’s a huge part of what we do. My son is 14 years old, I’ve got a daughter that’s getting ready to turn 20. Every hunt they’ve ever been on has been videoed. So not only do you have the joy of being able to show that footage to other people, but you also get the joy of spending the time in the woods with your kids, teaching them from just a little list of things. You can be there from the very, very beginning of when it starts to teach them to hunt the right way, safety the right way. Oh and by the way, if they get lucky enough to harvest an animal, you get to get them on video, too. So that’s a huge part of what we started and we still do it today.
Interviewer: Now do you reach out to other groups in Missouri and invite other fathers, mothers to bring their kids out, or what’s your stance on this?
Doug: We do, we do. Actually, in the very beginning, when we were just a team on a different show out of Arkansas, even though we didn’t own it, didn’t have anything to do with it, we still had our name. And we decided to give away a few hunts. We’re fortunate enough that we’ve got some good landowners, some good farmers and we lease about 5,000 acres in Missouri. And we’ve got more land than we can hunt. We’ve got several different farms and so I think it was about four years ago, four or five years ago, we gave away a hunt at a Whitetail’s Unlimited Banquet.
One of the biggest ones in the country is in Columbia, Missouri, ran by a good friend of mine Dan Vogt, who was the director of the year. He runs, I think, six or seven states, Whitetail’s Unlimited. And he gave that hunt away and it went for the most money at a Whitetails event and we were so proud of that. A lady that we’re now great friends with bought it, and she bought it and then gave it away to the crowd, to a kid, a deserving kid, a young girl won it. And so that’s been a tradition of ours ever since that we give away hunts. We give away two turkey hunts and two deer hunts every year, four auctions. In fact, we’re giving one away this Saturday night at a Rainbow House event in Columbia, Missouri. And Rainbow House is a house meant for troubled youths looking for a place to stay, even adults that need a place to stay for a night or a week, they can go there.
So we’re giving away a youth hunt this weekend, and it’s important to us to give away youth hunts because adults, for the most part, can afford to go hunt, whether it’s public land or lease or a guide. Kids however, some of those kids can’t. So teaming up with other individuals that like to purchase our hunts has been a blessing for us because…well, in fact, this weekend not only are giving away a youth hunt this weekend, but we gave away two youth hunts, turkey hunts last year. We’re taking two youths this weekend, and my son, to two kids that have never killed an animal in their life and we’re going to videotape the hunt for them. We’re so excited.
Interviewer: I’m just sitting here taking notes, one on the lady who bought the hunt then gave it away — that’s what it’s all about, ladies and gentlemen of the Whitetail Rendezvous Community. People just stepping up and saying, “Hey, kids are important.” And Doug, I just salute you for what you’re doing for kids because that’s our future.
Doug: Yes. And I’ll tell you what, it’s gotten us to meet a lot of good people in the industry, the Drurys, Mark and Terry Drury. Not so much Terry but Mark is a big involvement in our community because he lives so close. And it was last year, 2014, that the same lady was competing against the Drurys for our Kansas hunt. It was a youth hunt in Kansas that we put on last year. She was competing against one of the guys from Bow Madness, who’s now a real good friend ours, Brandon Jennings and Brick Stewart. They’re one of the teams on Bow Madness. She kept bidding against him and she finally won because she will never be outbid on a kid’s hunt.
As soon as she won that hunt, she gave it to the guy she was bidding against for his son. So we were lucky enough to meet Brick and Brandon from Bow Madness and take them. Not only did we take their son who missed a giant deer in Kansas on film, but we also invited Brandon and Brick back to our farm and they both killed on video and you’ll see those on Bow Madness and on one of the Drury’s TV shows this next year. We took his son turkey hunting in Nebraska two weeks ago. We’re going to meet him again in two weeks. He missed it, 30 yards with the bow, so we’re excited to have him back in camp in Nebraska, turkey hunting.
These events, these auctions, a lot of people like to go buy stuff and help out the organization, whether it be Whitetails Unlimited, which is one of our favorites, but I’ll tell you what, the money and the camaraderie that people get from the hunts that are given away, it’s priceless. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. We’ve met some of our best friends in the hunting industry at those events.
Interviewer: Well, listeners, again, Doug’s paying it forward and if you’re in the business, you’re a writer, you’re a personality, you’re a TV producer, think about what Doug just shared with us because it’s important for our hunting tradition. And Doug said it, and I’ll just echo it, it’s priceless for these kids. Thank you.
Let’s move right along and let’s talk about a couple aha moments, you know, you can’t figure something out and it’s just not coming together and all of a sudden the light bulb goes on or you go, “Holy fright. There’s the answer.” Let’s share a couple of those, Doug.