A phone call, a fishing trip, five Stonebergers, and one lake in Colorado. The rest became tradition.
In June of 1997, Jerry Stoneberger decided to take his dad, Stony, fishing for his birthday. The idea was simple: get Dad and Grandpa into the mountains for a weekend of fishing without the usual distractions, repairs, projects, RV fixes, or whatever else somehow turned a camping trip into a work weekend.
He called his brother, Jake. They each brought a son. Five Stoneberger men loaded up in separate trucks and headed into the Colorado mountains for a long weekend at Green Mountain Reservoir, a place they believed had trout, promise, and at least a fair chance of making them look like competent anglers.
As it turned out, the fish had other plans.
The first weekend was not a tournament. It was just a fishing trip. It produced exactly one fish, barely worth remembering if not for what that small, skinny, ugly little walleye eventually represented. But it also produced something far more important: the heritage behind what we now know as the SMART Weekend.
It became obvious on the drive home that something special had started. In separate trucks, heading back from the mountains, the conversation was the same: “that was a great weekend, we should do it again next year, and we should turn it into something we can share with the rest of the men in the family.”
The idea grew from there. The group started talking about a name, a logo, shirts, prizes, a leaderboard, and ways to make the weekend feel like something official, or at least as official as a Stoneberger fishing tournament probably needed to be. By the second year, the fishing trip had become an annual event that would help shape the family history around it.
They thought they were planning a weekend away. What they actually started was a family legacy.
From those five men going fishing, SMART has grown into a weekend that brings together family, and the occasional guest lucky enough to be tolerated. The location almost always changes, but the weekend does not. It is still held every year on the final weekend of June in honor of Stony's birthday.
The minimum has not budged in thirty years. Boys age into it; nobody ages out.
Day-one rule. We make no apologies and offer no exceptions.
Everything else has been debated, revised, misunderstood, argued over, and somehow preserved as tradition.
Every year, the last full weekend of June. Locations have rotated, evolved, occasionally been chosen out of stubbornness, and often out of necessity. The full list, 1997 through 2025, lives below. Locations marked TBD are awaiting confirmation.
Send corrections, missing years, or one-line stories to Jim Stoneberger and the ledger will be updated.