INDIANAPOLIS — In a moment of fantasy, Adam Troyer imagines the thrill, the excitement, the spirit of a caravan of cars following the Indiana University fishing team to its meets around the Midwest just like the scene in the movie “Hoosiers” when the whole town trails the basketball team to the state playoffs.

“That would be awesome,” Troyer said.

Then he gets real. It ain’t happening. Not only does the IU club fishing team have a shortage of fans, most of the students who root for basketball and football teams on the Big Ten Conference don’t even know it exists.

“A few friends and family?” said Troyer, a junior from Brownsburg who is president of the club speculated about who might turn out to cheer the group’s bass-catching prowess.

At the recent Indianapolis Boat, Sport and Travel Show, some members of the student-run team occupied a booth to raise awareness and money for the group.

Let’s just say that the recent changes in NCAA rules allowing student-athletes to benefit financially from Name, Image and Likeness, or NIL, have not trickled down to support the club fishing team.

Laughing at the likelihood, Troyer said, “We’re trying not to go bankrupt,” rather than make bankable profits.

That’s why Troyer and other team members devoted a week at the show to selling logo T-shirts ($25), caps ($25) and hoodie sweatshirts ($45) advertising the wearer’s allegiance to the Hoosier anglers.

It is fair to suggest that if someone is not close to one of the 30 team members, there is a good chance he or she has not even heard of the IU fishing team. A non-scientific poll of a half-dozen present students or recent graduates, all of whom follow Indiana U. sports, disclosed that none of them knew the squad existed. One said he had heard of the school’s club lacrosse team, but not a fishing team. One kinda, sorta, thought he might have heard anglers probably fished on nearby Monroe Lake.

Anonymity is a feature of the fishing team’s existence in Bloomington. Troyer, 21, studying finance and real estate, like several other team members, received early-in-life exposure to fishing through family, dipping a line for the first time when he was four.

The site was Holiday Park in Avon and he caught bluegill.

“I just remember wanting to go every day after that,” he said.

The high school in Brownsburg actually had a fishing team and high school events consisted of 80-to-100 boats on regional lakes with competitions won by weighing the five largest bass. The season was ordinarily spring and summer, but in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic there was some disruption.

The national high school championships were postponed until October on Kentucky Lake. Troyer was already enrolled at IU when the event took place against 250 other boats and he and his partner, Dylan May, finished second, earning plaques and splitting $4,000 in prize money.

May enrolled at Carson-Newman University in Tennessee, which unlike IU awards scholarships to members of its fishing team. May has one. Actually, when the season began at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri in mid-March, May and a partner placed 28th out of 230 scoring teams, ahead of anyone from IU.

While certainly the Indiana fishing team is not nearly as well-known as the storied men’s basketball team, or any other Hoosier intercollegiate team, either, one historic fact should be highlighted for all. When the club was founded in 1987 by professor Steve Lutz, it was credited with being the first college fishing team.

One might say IU has been a good influence on others. At the Lake of the Ozarks, some of the schools entered, big and small were the University of Nebraska, Auburn, Arkansas Tech, McKendree University and Murray State.

Fittingly, given IU’s origin story, the first recorded college fishing competition took place on Monroe Lake on April 18, 1992, pitting the Hoosiers against Purdue. The Boilermakers won.

Most teams associated with schools are club teams, with about 610 colleges and universities competing. There are several college bass fishing circuits, including the Abu Garcia College Fishing Series (the Lake of the Ozarks sponsor), Carhartt Bassmaster College Bass Fishing Series, the Fishlife Collegiate Tour, the FLW Outdoors College Series, and Boat U.S. Bass Pro Shops College Fishing Series.

The rules are basic. There are two anglers per boat, largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass of at least 12 inches can be counted towards the total of five weighed in. There are penalties for weighing a short fish or a dead fish.

Since there is plenty of room on the bodies of water where the fishing events take place, there is not a team competitor limit. Troyer said there are both men and women on the team and typically 10 anglers travel.

Much like other major sports where it helps to start young and competitors are introduced to a specialty early, IU fishing team members did, too.

Troyer is not the only IU angler who had a rod placed in his hand when he was first just about to start running around on his own two feet.

Payton Sodervick, 21, a junior from Wabash, said his father Barry entered tournaments and had him fishing by the time he was four. Fishing at Long Lake in Indiana, said Sodervick is where he “caught my first fish, a largemouth bass.”

He may not have known the species at the time, but there is a family photo of him with the fish so identification might be retroactive. “I’ve seen it,” Sodervick said of the milestone fish, so he knows the event was real.

The family owned a bass boat, so he entered club tournaments and did pretty well while also fishing for crappie for the fun of it.

“We’ve got a lot of people who aren’t as experienced,” he said of the team, however.

Aiden Burkshire of Lowell was a fish-almost-as-soon-as-he-could-walk guy, too, also estimating he fished for the first time when he was around four years old.

While fishing for northern pike at 17, on Lake Superior, Burkshire said he learned there was such a thing as college fishing. Growing up, he played football, basketball and baseball and that “made me competitive.”

He could compete at fishing in college? Burkshire’s reaction was, “Yeah, I want to do that.”

And yeah, even if classmates don’t realize it and the jumbo screen at Assembly Hall doesn’t hype upcoming fishing tournaments, Troyer, Sodervick and Burkshire, and their friends and teammates are repping Indiana University in their favorite sport.