Using Orthodromic Distance to Determine Homefield Advantage in Professional Bass Fishing Tournaments

The home team is widely viewed as having an advantage in most team sports. Individual sports are less inclined to have homefield advantage, since they are contested on neutral sites with contestants from a wide variety of locales. Bass fishing differs from most individual sports as the venue fished is governed by local biological and climatological variation. Thus, there may be a homefield advantage that accrues to anglers living close to the venue where the tournament is held. In this paper we examine angler performance in the two premier bass fishing tournaments in the U.S.: the Bassmaster Elite Series and Major League Fishing's Bass Pro Tour. We find that angler performance in both tournaments is related to characteristics that measure experience, aptitude, and past success. In addition, we find evidence that angler performance suffers as distance to the lake increases, and this result holds after controlling for other angler characteristics.