USC QB Jaxson Dart’s love of fishing pays off via patience

The freshman QB, making his first career start against UCLA on Saturday, has learned the wait can be worth it

Adam Grosbard (OC Register)  —  Jaxson Dart’s after-school ritual started in third grade. He would get home, grab his gear and let his parents know his destination before he rode his bike over to one of the local ponds in Kaysville, Utah. There, he would sit and fish until the sun went down, long after his curfew.

“All the way until the point that we would have to drive out and get him because he would never come home on time,” his father Brandon recalled with a chuckle, still exasperated and still amused years later.

Long before he was a quarterback at USC, Jaxson Dart spent every free moment out fishing. It was a way to decompress from day-to-day life, an opportunity to sit in nature for hours on end, an outlet for his competitiveness, even if he was only competing against himself and the fish that day.

But it also taught Dart an important life skill: patience. With fishing, less is more. So he can’t do too much with his lures or risk scaring the fish away. He could only sit and wait.

“Patience is always something that like hasn’t been my best trait, or my best quality. I get stressed out sometimes. But fishing has definitely helped me with patience and just learning that skill,” Dart says. “I always wanted it to be results immediately coming back, especially after I worked hard for something and I didn’t get the immediate results that I wanted. Sometimes like just having to wait for those to come through or come to fruition were like tough.“

Dart doesn’t have to wait any longer at USC. The highly touted true freshman will make his first start for the Trojans on Saturday against UCLA, the first USC quarterback to make his first start in the rivalry game in 41 years.

It comes at the perfect moment for Dart, with his confidence in his knowledge of the offense peaking as his body gets back to full health after a midseason injury.

“I’m excited and I’m ready,” Dart says. “I’m feeling really good and I feel the best I have since my injury.”

An early obsession

The first time Dart went fishing, he was 3. He and his dad found a quiet spot on a small lake in Southern Utah and threw some lures into the water. And on that first trip, Dart made his first catch.

“He’s just jacked. If you know Jaxson, he’s a super emotional kid that is just fully in tuned to everything that’s going on,” Brandon recalled. “And I was just like, ‘Holy cow, he friggin’ loves this stuff.’”

This wasn’t too out of the ordinary within the family. Brandon is an avid hunter, and most of Dart’s extended family spend time outdoors in some shape or fashion.

But fishing soon became an obsession for Dart. When his grandparents bought him his first fly set, he could be found on most nights watching YouTube videos on repeat learning how to tie different patterns.

“I would sit at the table for hours just trying to tie a fly,” Dart said before laughing at his younger self. “They were never good, but I would always try super hard to get it right.”

Becoming a fisherman became one of his earliest dream jobs, cycling through bass, fly and deep-sea. Most birthdays, he’d ask for new gear or a fishing trip as his present. He saved up his allowance and then go to Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shop to buy new lures or bait.

“The stench of his baits and everything in the garage, it was just like, ‘What the hell?’” Brandon said through a laugh. “You would just smell something in his fishing bag, you would just see anchovies.”

It was the same whenever the family went on vacations. His parents and younger brother, Diesel, could be sitting on the shore of Lake Powell, relaxing. But Dart would get into a dingy with a little motor and fish all afternoon along the edge of the water. Sometimes the motor would die and Dart would have to row the boat back in.

Or if the family went on a ski trip, Dart would elect to go ice fishing instead. No one would understand why he wanted to sit out in the cold for hours, but then he would return with a lake trout.

“He felt like he won the day,” Brandon said.

Dart explained it like this: “There was just something about fishing that was a little bit almost addicting for me. There’s a certain kind of rush when you hook into something on your line and you don’t know exactly what it may be, or maybe you do you know exactly what it may be and like the story I was telling earlier, it’s something that you were working for for a really long time. And it’s something that’s never guaranteed, so you’re always having to strive and you’re having to chase after something.”

A fishing tale

With that many fishing trips, stories start to stack up. Dart and his father picked the same memory when asked separately for their favorite.

It was the start of the summer before Dart’s senior year. He would go on to lead his new school, Corner Canyon High, to a Utah state title with 67 passing touchdowns and another dozen scores with his feet, a performance that would earn him the Gatorade National Player of the Year award.

But this was months before all that, in the early months of the pandemic, and there was no certainty he would even play a season in the fall. All he held was an offer from Louisiana with no certainty that he would get to showcase his skills again to earn more attention from colleges.

He went on a trip up to Fish Lake with his dad and a family friend. The anticipated summer weather played hooky, and instead they were greeted with a snowstorm and 20 mph winds. But Dart insisted on fishing through it, and theirs was the only boat on the entire lake.

As the day progressed and the storm worsened, Brandon got a text from a BYU assistant coach who wanted Dart to call him. Though he wanted to keep fishing until dark, Dart was eventually convinced to return to dock and make the call.

And that’s when BYU offered him.

“He was like totally jacked, right?” Brandon recounted. “He just had the one offer from Louisiana before, but this was a school that’s from his home state so he’s just so jacked about it.”

Rather than turning in for the day, Dart’s preferred celebration was to go back out on the lake and continue fishing for the remaining daylight hours. Still, no bites.

The next morning, Dart told his dad, “I think our luck’s changed.”

But it was much the same, even with better weather. There were more boats on the lake that day, but it didn’t seem like anyone was faring any better. So they decided to troll back to the dock and call it a day.

“An hour into it, friggin’ Jaxson, just like boom, he gets a lake trout,” Brandon said. “He’s like getting it in and he’s jacked out of his mind.”

It was Dart’s first lake trout, and the only one caught on the lake that day. The next four days after returning home, the double-whammy of the scholarship offer and the fishing victory were all Dart could talk about.

“His recruiting was really stagnant. So to be able to get an offer that it was like, at least we knew he was going to have an opportunity to play at a school that he would want to play at,” Brandon said. “To top it off with a lake trout, he was like, ‘This is one of the best days of my life.’”

The here and now

Fishing has also been a way for Dart to bond with friends. It was how he got to know several teammates at Corner Canyon after transferring prior to his senior year.

“He’s got such a fun personality. He’s really easy to get to know and pretty endearing to people from a social aspect,” Corner Canyon head coach Eric Kjar said. “We miss him just personality-wise around here. He’s just so fun with his teammates.”

Dart hasn’t gone fishing since moving to Los Angeles in January. Though he insisted on driving his F-150 to school in case an opportunity arose – even turning down an offer from his parents to buy a more practical car for the rigors of local traffic – it’s been mostly business since arriving at USC.

But that hasn’t stopped Dart from bonding with his teammates as they prepare for this rivalry weekend against UCLA.

“He can get along with anybody. When you can do that as a quarterback, that young, he’s confident in everything he do,” Trojans running back Keaontay Ingram said. “He takes pride in it. I feel like the offense is feeding off of that, and shoot, we’re ready to go for this weekend.”

The past two games, Dart split time with three-year starter Kedon Slovis. But Slovis’ lower leg injury suffered against Arizona State has made Dart the starter this week, and potentially the rest of the season.

The starting job was always the goal when Dart arrived at USC. It may have come a little sooner than even he expected, but it’s the moment for which he has worked and waited.

The patience, much like with fishing, has paid off.

“I think I’ve always been super goal-oriented. So I really strive to get what I want, and coming up short, coming up empty-handed is almost just not an option for me,” Dart said. “So I always kind of think of it like that. I would go to the extent so I could hopefully catch something or make the goal that I was working for.”

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