If you just wait, a good day will always come. The trick is staying positive while you wait, said 16-year-old Zach Vielhauer.

He was talking about fishing, but those lessons aren’t confined to the boat he shares with his fishing partner, 16-year-old Remington Wagner, Vielhauer explained.

“A lot of it is mental,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to keep yourself positive because you might have a day when you’re not catching any fish.”

But Saturday was one of the good days. Vielhauer and Wagner won first place in the Kansas BASS Nation High School Team Tournament at Clinton Lake. They held their day’s catch aloft to applause and the click of camera shutters before placing the fish in the bank’s shallows and watching them flit away.

The competition was one of four qualifiers leading up to the state tournament, which will take place in May 2016. Sixteen teams representing 10 different high schools from across Kansas competed Saturday, said Richard Heflin, Kansas BASS Nation youth director. The teams fished for eight hours — from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. — and first place went to the team whose top five fish weighed the most.

“We always say we hope you do well, we just hope we do one ounce better than you did,” Heflin said, noting that while it’s competitive, there is a lot of camaraderie between the teams, too.

Both Vielhauer and Wagner have been fishing since they were 3 or 4 and said one of the biggest things fishing has taught them is patience. The team caught about 100 fish in the eight hours they were on the water Saturday, but only three of them met the length requirements to qualify.

“You’ve got to have a lot of patience. You could go days and never catch a fish, but you’ve got to be ready,” Wagner said, adding that the next catch you pull in could be the biggest one you ever caught.

Wagner, a junior at Yates Center High School, and Vielhauer, a junior at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, are both members of Kick Back, a high school bass fishing club. Working as a duo, they said, means an important element to competing is teamwork. That teamwork includes the physical efforts of catching the fish, but also the mental aspect as well, Vielhauer explained.

“You have to have patience with the fish, yourself and your partner,” Vielhauer said, adding that joking does a lot to help ease the mood.

For Heflin, the competitive aspect also demands problem-solving skills, and he hopes that is something that the participants are able to learn.

“The thing I hope they gain is the understanding that in a competitive environment, you’re not always going to do well,” Heflin said. “To improve takes the ability to figure out what they could have done differently.”