Taylor Sharp & John Zimmerman: Casting for Hope and Fly Fishing as Healing

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 717 with Taylor Sharp and John Zimmerman of Casting for Hope, on how a high school senior project turned into a nonprofit that has raised more than a million dollars for women and families facing gynecological cancer.

The Origin of Casting for Hope

Tom Rowland: I've been checking out what you sent over, all the news stories and everything. It's really impressive what you've built with Casting for Hope. Obviously the origin story is an emotional one for you. If you wouldn't mind, can you tell us how you started your organization?

Taylor Sharp: Yeah. Well, we've had such a great team, a fleet of volunteers included in building our organization. Ten years into it, we're quite a bit different than when we started, but the mission of it all, and the emotion behind it, is the same. At Casting for Hope, we're a nonprofit that financially and emotionally assists women and families with a gynecological cancer diagnosis. That was all started in memory of my mom, who passed away from ovarian cancer when I was quite young. She was diagnosed when I was eleven, and I was an avid fisherman my whole life, but particularly at that stage of life. She had a couple of bouts with ovarian cancer and a couple of periods of remission, but it was in my junior year of high school when it came back for the last time. I had an English teacher at my high school, John Zimmerman, who was quite into fly fishing. I had grown up fishing for bass in golf course ponds and throwing a rooster tail through the streams of North Carolina, but I hadn't really gotten into fly fishing. My English teacher was a bit of an expert — a science teacher of his had shown him around the streams back in the day, and his dad had too. So it was in those last few months of my mom's battle with cancer that I really got into fly fishing on the streams of North Carolina, and got to understand how wonderfully regenerative it can be just to be out in the stream. The technicality of fly fishing put me away from my circumstances and gave me a bit of solitude. That's where we got our start — holding a fly fishing tournament to raise money for a cancer clinic in Asheville, North Carolina, which was going to put money toward the financial assistance wing of that clinic, to help women who were sitting next to my mom during treatment but had financial issues get through that tough time.

Tom Rowland: And what I was reading in your bio is that there isn't a lot of money raised for this type of cancer. Is that correct?

Taylor Sharp: It is. Those gynecological cancers are just talked about a little less, researched a little less, and financially supported a little less. I think my mom experienced that from the side of having fewer women to talk to who were going through the same thing. There are wonderful marketing campaigns for a lot of other cancers — teal is the color for ovarian cancer — but the signs, symptoms, and emotional support you might need are a little less prevalent. So we wanted to specifically focus on those women, to be loud and proud with our teal and our ovarian and gynecological cancer awareness programming, but also to provide financial assistance, because so many of those women's outcomes are really dark. I think the average life expectancy is often around five years if it's diagnosed at the stage my mom was. So they need a lot of help, and Casting for Hope was born to help them out where we could.

Tom Rowland: John also has a close connection to this, right? His grandmother died of the same thing?

Taylor Sharp: Yeah. John and I both got a front-row seat to being a caregiver, to having someone in our family pass away from cancer. It's tough to find anyone who hasn't been affected by cancer in some way, but he and I both understood two things. One was that fly fishing, and getting out into the streams, is a good way to get away from everything else on your mind and just relax — the act of wading into an area with clean enough water for trout, focused on the technicality of everything you're doing. We both understood that from personal experience. And we also had a soft spot for helping families going through a cancer journey. That's where Casting for Hope was really formed — this idea that we could take our love of fly fishing, and our understanding of how it can be a positive force in someone's life, and use it to fundraise too. So we do fly fishing tournaments that raise money for the financial assistance side of things, but we also do fly fishing retreats, where we bring out patients and their caregivers, teach them how to fly fish, and give them a weekend away from the medical setting.

Turning a Senior Project Into a Nonprofit

Tom Rowland: That's cool, because when I looked at the website there's a lot about the tournaments and the fundraising, and at first I thought this was just a fundraising thing — but then I found the retreat. Tell me about when you first started this. You went to a tournament, fished, and had an idea that spawned into what you're doing today. What was that initial conversation like, and how is it different from what it's turned into?

Taylor Sharp: It's interesting to look back. I was seventeen, a senior in high school, the year after I lost my mom, and I was diving deep into fly fishing. We had a thing at our school called the senior project, where you had to have a mentor and pick a craft to learn about and get hours of experience with. I decided to focus on competitive fly fishing and fly rod building, and John was my mentor. We not only learned how to build fly rods — he taught me how to hand-make them — but we also fished in some events. That was part of my senior project: a research paper on fly fishing, but also the act of building rods and competing. When we fished in that first one, it was also a charity event, so we saw a fundraiser happen through fly fishing, and I think we liked that combination — a sport we love, but doing something good in the world with it. It wasn't officially part of my senior project; it was a natural extension of it. I decided, let's do our own charity tournament, and it can help out some of those women my mom used to talk about — being in the chemo chairs in the infusion rooms next to her, some of them missing their next appointment because of financial issues. So we wanted to raise money for that cause. But honestly, I was a senior in high school doing this with my English teacher, about to go off to UNC Chapel Hill for college. I don't think we had any idea we'd even do another tournament, let alone start our own nonprofit. So it's amazing to see, ten years and a million dollars raised later, everything we've done on the competitive side and the retreat side. At the time, it was just the spring before I graduated, putting on an event.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. You created this vision and then followed through on it. What do you think was responsible for that? So many people have these goals or ideas and never follow through. What was different here with you two?

Taylor Sharp: I think, first of all, I really benefited from the support John had for my idea, and this cumulative idea we had together to do the tournament. He was already really supportive of me as a teacher and as someone taking me out to these fly fishing streams. I like to say John taught me most of what I know about fly fishing — a lot of the gear I was using in those early days, he owns. But also, when you're starting a project that has real heart to it, so closely tied to who you are — for me and John, we really had a heart for the fundraising we were doing. My mom left me with this quote: you can focus on your problems, or you can focus on your purpose. I think for me, for John, for Kathy, our executive director, and for everyone on our board and all our volunteers, we've all taken on that mantra, that in some way, this is our purpose. When you pour a lot of energy into that, you can be surprised by what comes of it.

Tom Rowland: You've done a really good job with that. Tell me about the retreat — how did you make that a reality? It seems like a marquee property, and now you can use it for tournaments, retreats, and having patients and caregivers come out. How did you identify the property and see that it was possible? That's a big vision to make happen.

Taylor Sharp: I feel like with Casting for Hope, there's always a big story attached to how we got from one thing to the next. With the retreat center, that's definitely true. In the beginning we were just a one-off fishing tournament, or so we thought, until the competitive circuit at the time wanted us to do another one and started promoting us, and we did more fundraisers. Then we thought, we don't want to just do tournaments as fundraisers — we also want to get patients and their caregivers out to the streams, we want to host a retreat. So the first two years we leaned on a family friend who had a mountain house near a stream. Pretty funny — we hardly got to do any fly fishing, because it rained nonstop. We did fly-tying sessions, talked all about fly fishing, did a casting lesson in the yard, but really the most fly-fishing-related thing they did was watch A River Runs Through It. So those first couple of retreats didn't really offer the fly fishing as much. But what we learned is that these women and their caregivers really needed that weekend away — they needed to get outside the everyday struggles of cancer, because it's pretty all-encompassing of their life. Getting away from the clinical setting, meeting other people going through the same thing, being able to talk about it with people who knew that experience — that's a thing we learned for sure: these retreats are as much about the fellowship as they are about the fishing. The retreat center is where we held our first tournament. Back when I was in John's class in high school, we were calling around trying to find a place to hold an event. Fishing clubs kept saying a Saturday in the spring is prime time, they had bookings, it might be difficult to find a time for us. But finally we talked to one fly shop with a guide service and access to some private water, and he said we could have it on a weekend, but it might not be available for a while, he'd check the calendar. Then he came back and said, hey, we've got this April 20th weekend if that works. And that's my mom's birthday weekend, so we wanted to do the whole thing. Just finding that place, and that first tournament, felt special. A few years later, the fishing club operating out there changed direction and no longer wanted to lease the property, and that's when the owners came to us and asked if we wanted to take over the lease. What a divine moment. John can even tell that story of how it happened.

John Zimmerman Joins the Show

Tom Rowland: John joined us a little late — John Zimmerman is your partner in this, and co-founder of Casting for Hope. John, welcome to the show, I'm glad you're here. Sorry we had some difficulty getting online.

John Zimmerman: Oh, that wasn't a we-difficulty, that was a me-difficulty.

Tom Rowland: Well, maybe — we just started with this new service, we've only done a handful of these, so maybe we were doing something wrong. Either way, when you saw there was an opportunity to maybe take over this lease, did that seem possible, or a stretch? What did you think as that presented itself?

John Zimmerman: Can I tell one thing they left out of the origin story? The owners got to know us very serendipitously and totally unexpectedly. I think it was the second or third year of the tournament — they knew this fishing tournament went on every year, but had no idea when. The fly shop failed to tell them the weekend it was happening that year, and they showed up unexpectedly, thinking they were coming up to the property for a totally peaceful, alone day, and instead found two hundred cars and a hundred and fifty volunteers, pretty wide-eyed about what on earth was going on. One of our good volunteers whisked them over to us and said, this is what's going on, these are the folks running it. Taylor had just had a promotional video made of the organization, so we took them into the house, showed them the promo video, and smoothed over the fact that they weren't having their solo day in the mountains as they'd thought. A couple months later, they called us. And to the question of whether it was a reach — we had been planning for it, putting funds away so that if something like this presented itself, we'd be in a financial position to activate it. I think we all thought it arrived four or five years ahead of schedule, but we'd done enough work preparing for it to activate the opportunity.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that's great. This property seems to have some high-quality fishing. There's something special about the water in this whole North Carolina, North Georgia area — they stock trout all over the world, but they don't get as big as they do here. Describe this property — what's special about this place?

Taylor Sharp: We definitely feel a bit spoiled, and I think we've even seen the entitlement in some of the people who fish there often, because all of a sudden someone's first fish on a fly rod is a four-and-a-half-pound rainbow, or a six-pound wild brown coming through on the spawn. People learn how to fight big fish out there very quickly, and even some regulars start getting bored with two-and-a-half-pound rainbows — that's not how it usually goes on a little trout stream in North Carolina. It's a wonderful place to teach people to fly fish, a beautiful property with a walking trail following the mile-plus stretch of river we have. When we have the retreats, the women get to walk down the trail right next to the river — it's beautiful and accessible for them. For our tournaments, there's an old farmhouse with a big meadow at the beginning, which is tournament headquarters, and as the river goes on we can split it into different beats for some big tournaments, and we also utilize the surrounding rivers for our larger events with multiple venues. We just adore it there. It's special as a fishery — this time of year we get spawning browns and always some massive rainbows. There have been days where we've seen some real bruisers come through — we've even caught a tiger trout there.

Tom Rowland: Have you?

Taylor Sharp: For us, it's special for reasons beyond that too. When you walk the trail, there are these big wooden boards, reclaimed and restored from a fallen-down barn, that the patients and their caregivers at our retreats paint an inspirational quote or message or verse on. We put those on the trees lining the river and the trails, so whether you're there for a tournament, a day of fishing, or a retreat, you have these reminders of what the space is about. It's where these top national tournaments are held, but it's also where people come for a really important weekend in their life.

Why the Retreat Center Matters

Tom Rowland: I'd imagine if you've been in a hospital setting a lot, as a caregiver or a patient, just getting out to sit on the bank of a river or the edge of the ocean — I don't know what it is about water, but it seems very calming to everyone. Whether you're fishing or not, that's incredibly therapeutic, and I'm sure you see these people feeling so much better just being in that environment. Then if you mix in the fishing, that's pretty amazing. So how did you decide to hold these tournaments in a way that's tied in with Team USA? I saw the logo for Team USA and youth fishing on your website. How did that angle come about, and were you involved in those tournaments?

Taylor Sharp: John and I were big into fly fishing and knew a lot of influential people in the scene. We'd fished back when Trout Legends was the large organizer of the competitive circuit, and in the beginning we just wanted to do a one-day fundraiser. But given some of the guides and friends we had in the fly fishing world — legends like Bo Cash, who had the longest-running fly shop in the Southeast and was one of John's mentors and fishing buddies, and Squeak Smith, a Trout Unlimited award winner for his conservation work — we had these types of people involved from the beginning. So on one hand we were just trying to get people out for a fun day of fishing, but then the Team USA youth team came, and some of the top guides in the area came, and it got competitive really quickly. Credit to John —

John Zimmerman: I had done some tennis coaching, and a lot of tennis tournament organizing in my past.

Taylor Sharp: So he knew how to organize an event, and I think we had a compelling story with me being a young person doing this in honor of my mom. There was a great venue, and the right people came out to that first one, and it all clicked. Trout Legends said, hey, we'd love for y'all to do this again, we'd love to promote you to an even higher-ranking tournament. All those Team USA people, especially the youth team, said this is a great practice ground for us. With top anglers coming in from Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Tennessee, this became one of the flagship events in the whole competitive circuit of fly fishing. We're really fortunate those people latched onto us early on. Fast forwarding a bit, we got named a gold-level event.

Tom Rowland: What is that? Describe a gold-level event and how it's different from any other.

Building Ties to Team USA and Gold-Level Tournaments

John Zimmerman: The gold-level terminology relates back to Trout Legends, when it was the sanctioning body for fly fishing tournaments in the U.S. They've since gone through a rebrand and are a different organization now. But the way it used to work: a bronze-level tournament had two sessions, a silver tournament had four sessions, and the gold levels had five sessions. It's easy to put on a bronze tournament, because you really only need one piece of solid water — you can fish the top half in one session and the bottom half in another. But for a five-session event, where everybody fishes all five sessions, you need five pieces of water, and five pieces of really high-quality water within a small radius, where somebody only has to drive thirty or forty-five minutes between them, is difficult to find. We were really lucky to be in Western North Carolina, where we had access to five pieces of consistently good water.

Tom Rowland: Wow. Is all that on your property?

John Zimmerman: No. We do two venues on our side — Big Rock and Little Rock — and then the upper and lower North Toe in Spruce Pine, and the Cane River in Burnsville.

Taylor Sharp: It's just the diversity of water John's getting into now, at the different venues.

John Zimmerman: Having that number of pieces of water that work is tough, so I think it's one of the reasons we got bumped up to gold — it's difficult across the country to find that much good trout water so close together.

Taylor Sharp: Those gold-level events, ours in particular, have two sessions on private water, two sessions on public delayed-harvest streams with a lot of stocked fish, and one on a little wild creek. So you're going from catching an eight-to-ten-pound rainbow or brown on our water, to other anglers around you at the public water, to this little wild stream where you're catching the smallest fish — there's a good diversity to it.

Inside the Draw and Competition Rules

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about the rules. Does everybody fish every piece of water?

Taylor Sharp: Yeah. At a five-venue, five-session, gold-level, three-day event, there are eight teams of five anglers. At any given time you've got one teammate on every water, and you swap out throughout the entire weekend. So every individual angler fishes all five venues, and at any given time a team is represented, one person at each venue.

Tom Rowland: How do you select the water — do you draw?

Taylor Sharp: In the early years it was very simple — name out of a hat, a beat-draw type thing. But we have a much more advanced system now. John, do you want to get into our beat-draw process?

John Zimmerman: We went through twenty-four, thirty-six hours of work creating a draw that works, so all beats are fished every session, and nobody fishes the same beat behind a teammate immediately. It's an incredibly complicated draw system, so we created it correctly one time. Now we draw for team spots — the draw goes down each of the flights. There are five flights, and a spot for every teammate on every team in the flight. First we draw all eight teams out into a team spot, then we draw each of the five team members out, and they become team member one, two, three, four, five, across the flights. It takes us about thirty minutes to do it live now — folks who try to pull things out of a hat and redo it take hours to get the draw done live.

Taylor Sharp: It's a huge process to make sure no teammate fishes the same beat on any of the rivers. We figured out the right thing, and then it's randomized, and you get what you get. It's interesting from a competitive standpoint when these flights are determined, especially when we've had great members of Team USA, world champs, and national champs at these events. When you see one flight stacked with two or three of the best anglers, that's a flight to watch, but it also decreases their chances of winning, because they're cannibalizing those top-flight spots. You can get lucky if you're in a different flight, because really you're competing against the people within your own flight for your placing. It's been quite fun at our events, because we get a huge draw — it's a top competitive event in the country, one of only a couple modeled after the World Championships, so it's a really good practice ground for Team USA, adult and youth. What's unique about our event is that every fish caught is raising money for our cause — some of them get just as into the fundraising as the competition. We have an online platform where people can get pledges made for fish caught, so the fundraising total goes up throughout the weekend, and anglers go out to their communities, friends, and families saying, hey, I'm fishing in the U.S. Youth National Championships and raising money for this cause for women in North Carolina. That's happening in Washington, Colorado, and Pennsylvania too. At some of these events we've seen forty and fifty thousand dollars raised just from the fish caught that weekend.

Tom Rowland: Really? Wow.

Taylor Sharp: It's tremendous to have that energy of, okay, who's going to win, but also, everyone's raising a lot of money.

Inside Competitive Fly Fishing

Tom Rowland: That's super cool. I've got friends on that competitive team, and it's interesting because there are a lot of different techniques. What kind of techniques are you seeing from the Team USA folks and the people with aspirations to pursue those tournaments? What do you see them doing differently than the average angler on public water?

Taylor Sharp: John can go into this further, but the quick thing I'll say is that in the ten years we've been doing this, we've seen the evolution of gear and style into the euro-nymphing style. I remember when the first person had that rod, and the next year half of them did, and the year after that, all of them did.

John Zimmerman: I'll just make one comment about why our events have been so successful — Taylor and I are much better organizers than we are competitive fishermen, so we put our energy into our skill sets, but we do okay when we enter an event. I've definitely seen the European-style high-stick nymph technique become really dominant. I've also seen a lot of anglers going back, especially in skinnier water, to old-school things like dry-dropper rigs. Another thing I've seen, especially in the last five years, is micro streamers becoming all the rage across the competition fishing scene — a lot of anglers using those tiny size twelve and fourteen micro streamers.

Tom Rowland: And that's working on the big fish in your water, those little…

John Zimmerman: Tiny things? I think what they love about it is they can fish it as a nymph — cast it and dead-drift it down, bob it a little, fish it as a wounded fish, or those micro streamers can work as a big stonefly trying to get to the surface. They basically get two casts out of the same drift — drift down, then jerk back up, and get two drifts.

Taylor Sharp: It's pretty amazing to watch some of these top competitors work the water. A lot of our pit-crew volunteers, over the years we've had John's high school students, random people who supported our cause, and interested anglers who just want to learn from the best. If you can watch some of these national-team anglers fish, you learn so much about their strategy — where they're fishing first, how long they spend in a section, how often they're changing flies, how they strategize a three-hour session in one specific hundred-yard area. It's really interesting to watch.

Tom Rowland: Somebody like that would be a volunteer measuring or counting fish — what are the volunteer opportunities where somebody could watch one of these guys fish for three hours?

Taylor Sharp: Depending on the event, it's competitor-controlled versus volunteer-controlled. In a competitor-controlled event, you're fishing for half a session and then judging the person who was judging you for the next session — that's ensuring the rules are followed, but it's also measuring and recording the catch.

Tom Rowland: So wait — if we're on two different teams, you're watching me and then I'm watching you?

John Zimmerman: In a competitor-controlled event, yes, you'd flip-flop.

Tom Rowland: How do you decide who goes first? That might be a very strategic move.

Taylor Sharp: If I had first crack in session one, you'd have first crack in session two, but on different sections of water, so the same water isn't fished twice in a row. There's a difference, depending on the time of year, between a thirty-degree morning at eight a.m. and a forty-two-degree morning, and those flip-flop, but you're never fishing directly after the same person.

John Zimmerman: Competitor-controlled, in some ways, is nice because they can handle the fish quickly and in a healthy way, and they know the rules and can move fast because they're already in waders. But that means they're fishing half the time and judging half the time. In the past — we stopped this during Covid, and some of our events don't do it anymore — we had a massive fleet of volunteers so anglers would be fishing the whole time and always have a volunteer judge. That's where those volunteers really learned a lot, because all of a sudden a high school kid, or a novice angler, or someone who just wants to support a nonprofit, gets paired with one of these anglers putting on a show — running around, never not measuring or recording a fish. We've had multiple records broken at our events for the number of fish caught in a session. I think one time someone caught a hundred and one fish in a three-hour session, and the next year it was a hundred and five, and the year after that, a hundred and six.

Tom Rowland: Do the math on that — hooking up, landing, netting, measuring, and getting back out there, catching over a hundred fish in a three-hour session. That's not even counting time spent breaking off, retying a new fly, and moving down the river.

Taylor Sharp: I'm imagining anglers like Devin Olson, Michael Bradley, and Mason Sims — when you see you've drawn a beat the afternoon after one of them fished it that morning, you're like, oh gosh, you don't like fishing after someone like that. But what's funny on the flip side is when someone complains about a beat and says there weren't really many fish in it, and then the next session someone else catches forty-two there.

John Zimmerman: There's a lot that Taylor didn't mention, like their efficiency — they sit at home and practice, tying knots, organizing their fly boxes so they have a confidence box and don't waste time picking flies. The good fishermen I've guided don't waste time on the stream the way normal fishermen do, not knowing how to tie a knot correctly, or going through fifty boxes of flies and getting paralyzed by the choice. They spend loads of time off the river preparing to be on the river. That's one of the huge things that separates the really good competitive anglers from the rest of us — their at-home prep work.

Tom Rowland: There are some guys out there that are pretty dang good, especially once you get into the euro-nymphing. My friend Pete Erickson, who's been on the team a bunch of times, is one of them — those guys just clean the place out. It's interesting because competitive fly fishing is in its infancy compared to competitive bass fishing, which has had tournaments basically every weekend for fifty years. But it's the same kind of thing — the judges in those bass boats are volunteers who might get paired up with a top pro, and imagine what you'd learn. Those guys have been practicing since they were eight years old and can make a cast anywhere. Now that's bleeding over into competitive fly fishing, and it will make everyone much better, much faster. I'm a big believer in how competition raises the bar — one guy has a euro-nymph rig and does really well, and the next year twice as many people have it, and then it's everybody.

Cherokee Classic, the 5K, and Growing the Mission

Tom Rowland: Once you started these gold-level tournaments, you added something else, like the Cherokee Classic. What is that?

Taylor Sharp: For a number of years we did that because there are barriers to entry to the gold-level event — the forty slots sell out, sometimes within minutes, and some people don't get in. It's highly competitive, fishing intensely for three days straight, and it's a big time commitment. So we wanted something with fewer barriers — shorter, in a different location, less highly competitive. The Cherokee Classic was one where we had a good partnership and held a two-day event.

John Zimmerman: It was always two days. We haven't done it in a few years.

Taylor Sharp: That was great, because we got to use their water, both the Trophy and Enterprise water, and it gave people a different slice of Western North Carolina. For the past two years we've done the U.S. Youth National Championship, which is only for those anglers. John will host another one in the fall that might just be a one- or two-day event at our retreat center, to make it easier for someone who can't commit to the full weekend. It's fun for us to introduce more people into our story and the Casting for Hope family — they fish the water, and then go out to their communities and tell their story about raising money for this cause. It's been tremendous, the number of people who didn't know about us before fishing in a tournament and now come to volunteer as guides at our retreats, or bring their business on as a sponsor for the next tournament. We've really organically grown our donor base as the number of people who have fished or volunteered has grown.

Tom Rowland: That's really cool, how you've figured out how to have these competitive events, in the most competitive fashion toward Team USA, and also raise money and stay true to your mission. Whose idea was it to raise money by taking pledges based on the number of fish caught?

Taylor Sharp: That was a new project for us — I hadn't seen anyone else do that in competitive fishing. I grew up doing Relay for Life fundraising walks, so there was something familiar about it. I don't remember exactly, but I remember advocating for building this pledge platform, and being thankful for how the organization works, because we've got a full-time executive director, Kathy, who's been in the cancer world for so long. She was previously at the cancer clinic we'd been benefiting for years, and she works with patients every day. We've got a big board and a whole fleet of volunteers — we're a properly structured organization now. When I wanted to build out this online pledge platform, I needed John and the board's support to put some funds into it, and John was hugely helpful. Oftentimes I have the ideas, and between the two of us we figure out how to actually implement them.

John Zimmerman: It originally started with an angler wanting to get this pledge thing going, and back in the dark ages it was a piece of paper — a form with a blank for a name, phone number, and email address, and anglers would get people to sign and hand those in at the tournament. I remember being in the office pulling my hair out because I couldn't read the handwriting to get the email addresses down to send the invoices, and I thought, we could do this so much better. That was Taylor's vision — that this should be an online platform people could share.

Taylor Sharp: That was what I wanted out of it — a site we could run all of our tournaments off of, a one-stop location that everybody could go to, including people who want to keep up with the fundraising totals. In the end I got what I wanted out of it, and John got what he wanted — we've made a couple hundred thousand dollars off of it for women and families. It's certainly been one of our better ideas, and it really lets our competitive events feel the spirit of who we are as an organization. It's a clear reminder to anglers that every fish you catch, even on a tough day, raises money for women and families who really need it. That's been a healthy reminder in the messaging of this tournament series under Casting for Hope, and we've been blown away by how much the fishing community has embraced it.

John Zimmerman: It's really fun to watch anglers get as upset about dropping a fish because it's not going on their scorecard as they are about the fifty dollars that's not going toward the cause. We get that so many times — people having that gut-punch moment because they know every fish they catch is fifty dollars, and they just lost it. That's been a really powerful thing too.

Tom Rowland: You've also expanded this to other things — I saw the 5K run. How did you decide to do that?

John Zimmerman: That's a funny one. When we were raising money for the Hope Trust originally, we'd built up quite a bit of liquidity with them, and kept some back after every event as seed money for the next one.

Taylor Sharp: This is when it was just me and John raising money for another organization, in those early years.

John Zimmerman: Then we decided we wanted to do our own thing, and we left all our seed money behind — we had no money, we were starting completely from scratch. I personally wrote a check to the bank to open our first checking account, because we had no foundation money. The 5K was originally our first fundraiser, to pay our 501(c)(3) filing bills. We haven't been able to do it since Covid hit, but hopefully it's making a return.

Tom Rowland: You should have a category where you run it in waders.

Taylor Sharp: From the bottom of the property to the top. One thing that was cool about the beginning of that is it got us away from the fly fishing stuff we'd been doing almost exclusively. Kathy, the former executive director of the nonprofit we were raising money for, saw enough of a need with these gynecological cancer patients in particular that she wanted to start something to advocate and fundraise for them, and similarly John and I had an interest in earmarking funds for those women, because I had a closeness to it. So in those early years we brought Kathy into the fold, and now it's the three of us starting Casting for Hope, the 501(c)(3). It was cool because it was one of John's English students at the time who, for her senior project, decided to do a 5K to raise money for us — only a few years removed from my own senior-project extension with John to do the first tournament. Almost every year we have interns who are high school students in my hometown, taught by John, and at some events we'll have forty high school kids volunteering, setting up hammocks and tents in the woods, putting in a full weekend of service hours. It's amazing how we've stayed true to that young-person service element — in our small hometown of about twenty thousand people in Western North Carolina, everyone seems to know about Casting for Hope, and there are hundreds of kids every year who donate their time. That's furthered by groups like the U.S. National Team making their national championship a philanthropic endeavor each year.

What Makes Casting for Hope Last

Tom Rowland: It's really cool how you've taken something you were passionate about, fishing, and something else you'd both had experience with, which is very emotional, and mixed those together into something effective, unique, and long-lasting. I've seen other fishing organizations doing real good, but I've also seen people with the same passion and purpose whose efforts don't make it as far as yours did. What's the difference?

Taylor Sharp: The first thing I'll say, and I know John will have good things to add, is that we started so true to who we were, in such a grassroots effort. It was a student and a teacher doing something close to our hearts, with the support of the local fishing community, fellow students, and teachers in the school system, and that grew each year. Our small hometown continues to be such a stronghold of our fundraising, because from that grassroots effort, more and more people every year have seen the work we do, see the value in it, and continue to donate, and donate more. We've stayed true to that grassroots effort, but we've also expanded deeper into the fly fishing community — not just the one event, but additional events, and not just local anglers, but anglers from all over the country. Gradually, over the ten years, we've remained in that slow-growth mode, to the point where in any single moment you wouldn't see the growth much, but looking back you can see how many changes we've made.

Tom Rowland: Maybe consistency is a big part of that — a lot of people hope to move the needle and it doesn't quite happen that year, but you guys have just stayed at it.

John Zimmerman: Yeah. The only thing I'd add is I don't think people who have a major passion for a fundraiser realize at the outset how much behind-the-scenes work it takes to keep it going long-term. I like to say that for every hour of the fun part of the fundraiser, there are five hours of office work — five hours of bookwork, five hours at the computer sending emails or invoices. People need to know going in that if they want the fun part, they're going to have to do the hard work to get things organized, write meeting agendas, sit on Zoom calls, put a draw together. That's one area where Taylor and I work really well together — he has great vision skills, and my skills are much more in organizing. Vision without organization doesn't work, and organization without vision is just putting paperclips together. You have to have both to be long-lived.

The Team Behind the Mission: Taylor, John, and Kathy

Tom Rowland: Both of you have other things going on — John, you're still a teacher full-time, and Taylor, I read that you're a Morehead Scholar. My father-in-law was also a Morehead Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill, so I know what goes into that. At what point do you need to find a Kathy, someone to run the organization, and how hard is it to hand your baby over to somebody else?

John Zimmerman: I'm glad you brought that up — I think that's another great thing with Casting for Hope. The answer is immediately. You need a Kathy immediately, and we had one immediately — when we decided to start raising money for the Hope Trust, Kathy was there. That's one of the things we say at Casting for Hope: John and Taylor make the money, Kathy spends it. That's worked really well for us, being the fundraising duo and handing the funds off to the third leg of our group, to take care of the patients with us.

Taylor Sharp: That goes back to the earlier question about our success too — we had a young person with a story, a vision, and community-building skills, and someone else with a lot of experience organizing and rallying people together. John's a teacher, so he could put on those events, and he was really good at keeping us on track doing the writing we needed to do, creating our bylaws, and running the organization behind the scenes. Kathy was at a different stage of life than both of us — she'd been working at a women's cancer nonprofit for over a decade, so she knew the ins and outs of patient care and how to be there with them. We had very different personalities, expertise, and stages of life, and I think those combined — you don't often have that in a founding team. It's kind of nice that we now know really well how to work with one another, and that extends to our board and volunteers who fit right into the right places. We're good at running events and raising money, and Kathy's really good at working with patients every day. Kathy, through Casting for Hope, is oftentimes the first call when a woman hears about her diagnosis from a doctor and then goes to a patient navigator, who says, hey, you've got to call Kathy, because she can help you right now. A lot of these women come to us because we're one of the few organizations that can offer immediate financial help. Counselors and patient navigators at hospitals know about what we do — we bring them, and oncologists, out to our retreats and teach them how to fly fish too, so they can tell the patients they serve about what we offer on the emotional-assistance side. So, coming back to team — John and I are talking today, but there are so many people involved in this.

Looking Ahead

Tom Rowland: It's got to be so rewarding, you guys doing so much good for so many people. There's more to it than just being passionate about something — I've seen a lot of organizations start and not quite make it, and others that do, and I know there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into it. What does the future look like for Casting for Hope? What would you like to see in the next few years?

Taylor Sharp: John, where do we start? We've done some things recently — John's a teacher full-time and still lives near where we got our start. I'm back in North Carolina for our events, but I live in Brooklyn and I'm a filmmaker, that's my day-to-day career, and we do this on the side, on a volunteer basis. With our growth, we've realized we need to add more people to the team, so now we have Kathy as executive director and we've also hired an executive assistant. I think we recognize it can't always rely on the same people, so preparing for growth from an infrastructure standpoint has been really good for us. That retreat center — we've been in a long-term lease situation there, and it's been great, but we have visions for that retreat center to become Casting for Hope headquarters going forward. If we're ever given the opportunity, the idea would be to own that property, build out a nice lodge, and expand our operations there too. We do most of our events in North Carolina, but I wouldn't have expected what we've done ten years ago if you'd asked us then, so who knows if in ten years we'll be further outside North Carolina. There's a lot of great fly fishing, and a lot of people with a heart for the cause and people who need help, in other states too — so that could be something down the line.

Tom Rowland: Nice. John?

John Zimmerman: I agree with the last thing Taylor said, as a blue-sky for Casting for Hope. Something we've learned is that you have to be patient for the right thing and the right person to come along, instead of following every little rabbit trail. If it's not the right thing at the right time, you let it pass, until the right thing, or the right person, comes along. I'm waiting on the right person, in the right place, at the right time, from somewhere out west or in another state close by, where we don't necessarily have the network to get a chapter off the ground — but a chapter in another hot state for fly fishing, with the right person interested in putting some retreats on there and creating a chapter, I think would be great.

Tom Rowland: Well, maybe they're listening to this podcast right now.

How to Get Involved

Tom Rowland: Alright, how do people help? If somebody wants to be in the tournament, or wants to donate money, what would you suggest? How do they find out everything?

Taylor Sharp: First and foremost, castingforhope.org is our website, and Casting for Hope on Facebook and Instagram as well. Please follow along, check us out, learn more, and donate if you're able, even from afar if you can't make it to an event, or volunteer, or come compete. This year in particular we have as much need as we've ever had — with our growth, more patients need our help, and we need to find the right people who can continue to support us, so we don't say no to anyone who needs it. If you ever want to make it out to fish an event or volunteer, give John or me an email — john@castingforhope.org or taylor@castingforhope.org. We'd love to plug you in. Our April tournament is our gold-level event, and registration comes around at the beginning of the year, so if you or a team want to get in there, that's a huge crash course into what we do at Casting for Hope. There are events throughout the year, fishing and not — music events, 5Ks, and more — so hopefully folks can go to our website, sign up for our newsletter, and fit in where they can.

Tom Rowland: I think you'll have people do that, because it seems like a really good organization you guys have built. Thanks for coming on the show and telling us all about it. Go check out castingforhope.org, and you're also on social media?

Taylor Sharp: Facebook and Instagram. Active.

Tom Rowland: Alright, go check them out. Thanks so much for coming on, and we'll talk to you soon, and good luck in the upcoming year.

Taylor Sharp: Thanks, Tom, and tight lines to anyone who's listening.

John Zimmerman: Alright. Thank you.

Tom Rowland: Okay. See you.