On the Other Side of the Lens: Coach Danny Suggs in the Star Tribune

If you've been in the building on a sub day, on the water with the fishing team, or anywhere near a TG sideline, you know Danny Suggs, often from behind a camera. Last week, he wound up on the other side of the lens. 

Star Tribune outdoors columnist Dennis Anderson devoted a recent column to Danny and to a question worth sitting with: who is going to carry Minnesota's fishing and hunting traditions forward?

Read the full column at the Star Tribune

Danny Suggs' connection to Totino-Grace runs deep. He is the father of two graduates, Ryan Suggs '18 and Logan Suggs '23. He covers classrooms here, he started and still coaches our fishing team, and if you have a favorite photo of your kid in an Eagles uniform, there's a decent chance he took it.

What students may not know is the career behind all of that. Danny came to Minnesota from Illinois in 1973 to play hockey at Mankato State, later switching to football at the same school. He started fishing the Minnesota River in college and never really stopped. He went on to direct tournaments for the Minnesota Pro/Am Bass Tour and a long list of celebrity events, hosted a television program called Fishing Time with Danny Suggs, and led the POCO Tournament Trail, a bass circuit broadcast across the southeastern U.S. He has run youth fishing clinics for years, and today he sits on the board of MN-FISH.

Anderson caught up with Danny at Game Fair, where he ran daily seminars on his specialty, river smallmouth. Anyone who has fished with him knows the style. He reads moving water like a map, pointing out the riffles, seams and eddies where smallmouth hold, and explaining why a fish sits in one spot and not the one twenty feet upstream.

The column's larger point is that Minnesota's outdoor traditions continue only if young people are introduced to them, and most people get started because someone brought them along. As Danny told Anderson, "It's important to have role models." He has spent a career being that person for young anglers, on television, at clinics, at seminars, and in a boat with a high schooler who has never held a rod.

Which is why a high school fishing team is not a small thing.

Coaching a high school fishing team is not glamorous work. It is early mornings, gear hauling, permission slips and a lot of patience with teenagers learning to tie knots in the cold. Danny does it because he believes a student who gets one good day on the water may spend the next fifty years as an angler, a volunteer and someone who takes care of a place.

That is formation, and it happens well outside a classroom.