Barngrover Crowned AWA World Champion!
North Carolinian proves his skills with wire-to-wire win of inaugural event.
Russell Barngrover of Charlotte, N.C., proved his superior deer-hunting skills against a field of qualified outdoorsmen from across the country and was crowned the AWA World Champion at Giles Island in Mississippi.
The affable Executive Vice President of SteelFab Inc, who sports a close-cropped steel-gray crew cut and studies the hand-to-hand combat arts of Krav Maga and Taekwondo, is always ready with a smile and led the field of national qualifiers for the entire three-day tournament. While his final-day lead was never seriously threatened, the mystique and big-buck rich habitat of Giles Island, as well as the threat of competitor envy, never afforded him a lax moment.
“That last day, I felt pretty good about the stand I was on but my biggest concern was that because everyone knew where I was at, somebody was going to come in and sit in the same area,” said Barngrover.
As he did at the Whitetail Pro Series Georgia Qualifier, Barngrover staked his claim and bet most of his tournament life on a single spot. In Georgia, he only left his wooded “money spot” on Day Three of competition, while at the AWA World Championship Barngrover started in the bottoms before gambling on a green food plot known as the Varmint Stand.
“I had a great set at the Gopher Plantation in Georgia, but by Sunday I was seeing all the same deer and had shot the place up. I had to make a decision to leave and decided to hunt a field,” said Barngrover, who eventually qualified for the championship with a second-place finish at the event. “At Giles Island, I had placed a stand in the bottoms that created a natural pinch-point with the end of one of the island’s lake but after two mornings of only shooting one doe, I decided not to hunt it any longer.”
Instead of returning to the thick, natural-browse-filled and bedding-area-rich bottomlands, a strategy many AWA pros believed would be the key to winning the championship, Barngrover hunted an area known as Varmint, a wide-open, finger-laced food plot that was responsible for producing every other deer he pulled the trigger on.
“It was a big green field with fingers coming out from both sides. When you actually sat out here in the middle of it, the wind either blew from the north or south and it never affected those side fingers,” said Barngrover, who leaned against a tree and built a natural brush blind to conceal himself. “I figured deer would come out on those fingers, which they did, and basically where I built that brush blind it was the perfect spot; it was situated in the center of the field and looked down the different fingers.”
The site allowed Barngrover to post daily scores of 565.25 on Day One, 545.17 on Day Two and a championship-sealing Day Three score of 201.33. His three-day total of 1311.75 points fell less than 100 points shy of Brandon Cartwright’s AWA record of 1405.31 points, which was established during the Texas Qualifier at Big Woods on the Trinity.
“My strategy for the entire event, the one thing I didn’t want to do, was risk a bad shot and lose points,” said Barngrover, referring to the AWA Scoring System that rewards clean and ethical shot placement while heavily penalizing ill-advised shots. “I was really going after that all-time score and in hindsight I should have shot more does, but I didn’t want to screw up some of my spots too early.”
From a possible 15 shots over the three-day event, Barngrover pulled the trigger 12 times and maximized all but one shot. His total championship score included four does and eight bucks. Among those were bucks that averaged 198.67 points, 211.33 points, 198.67 points, 226 points and 101.33 points.
At 226 points, the highest-scoring animal was taken on Day Two and was a young but brutish double-drop tine buck that Barngrover had seen the evening before. “I had used all five shots for the day when he came out!” he said. “I just had to sit there and watch him walk away and then hope he’d come back the next day.”
While he did eventually put the gnarly racked buck on his tally sheet, Barngrover’s consistency and strategy of making every shot count is what drove him to the top of the standings. His lone slip came on the final trigger pull of the final day.
With shooting light fading, what looks like a young 6- or 8-point buck entered the food plot he was hunting. While Barngrover made a clean kill, AWA judges were unable to confidently and accurately Antler Score the animal, so it received the de facto award of a mature doe (50 points) plus an additional 10 points for 60 total points. Far from costing him points, the buck padded Barngrover’s lead and capped his championship run.
As for what’s next for Barngrover, celebrity status and congratulations among friends and family has ensued, as has press coverage in his hometown newspaper, the Charlotte Observer. But the personal satisfaction the Whitetail Pro Series and AWA Championship has given Barngrover far outweighs any accolades.
“Winning this has given me an overwhelming sense of accomplishment knowing that I competed against the best of the best and walked away the champion,” said Barngrover, who plans on taking friend, and AWA pundit, Liam Pickett, on yet another excursion in search of the newcomer’s first deer with a bow.
