Paul Franson nominated his friend Don “Big D” Agostinelli for catching a 2-pound crappie on a white plastic jig suspended under a float during one of the brief warmups in late March in Highland Park.
“Didn’t get a length, we weighed it on his Rapala scale,” emailed Franson, the former Downers Grove North baseball coach who was inducted into the IHSBCA Hall of Fame in 2000. “It had some width to it.”
It’s the right time of the year for big crappie to be caught with more regularity.

Full-length view of Don “Big D” Agostinelli with his big crappie.
Provided
Here’s a full-length view.
FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times. The online posting here at chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on the wide world of the outdoors.
To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or Instagram (@BowmanOutside).