Annual fishing tournament casts for a cause

In the second week of November, Ben Shroyer was making one of his monthly visits to the cancer ward at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg when a social worker approached him about a family in need of financial assistance. Shroyer promptly walked into a hospital room and introduced himself to a boy and his mother.

“What can I do to help you guys?” he asked. When the mother hesitated, he said, “Seriously, what can I do to help?”

“We’re actually late on our rent,” Shroyer recalls the mother replying. 

“Well, how much is your rent?”

“It’s like $1,500.”

Shroyer pulled out his checkbook, wrote a check for that amount and handed it to her. “She just, like, started crying,” Shroyer says.

These impromptu encounters are among the most rewarding Shroyer experiences in his job as co-founder and executive director of Casting For The Kids, a 

Sarasota nonprofit that helps the families of children with cancer up and down the region. The charity’s name comes from a fishing tournament it holds in September in Sarasota Bay off Siesta Key that not only raises money but frees cancer-stricken children from hospital floors and onto boats for a day of sun, fresh air and angling.

Working with a gift-giving budget that hovers around $100,000 annually, Shroyer also provides aid to families who apply through the organization’s website and via word-of-mouth. Some of the nonprofit’s beneficence is bittersweet — like the $6,000 it gave to a family of a terminally ill boy so the parents could stay home with him during the last three months of his life. Or the time Shroyer set up a trip to One Buc Place for a football-loving kid, where he met such Buccaneers as Baker Mayfield and Mike Evans. A couple of weeks later, with the help of Tampa Bay Buccaneers executive Brian Ford, Casting for The Kids set up a wingding for the young man at Raymond James Stadium, replete with a police escort that included a motorcycle cavalcade. He died the following Thursday.

Shroyer’s entry into the charity world resulted from his family’s own cancer crisis. Starting at age 2, daughter Hannah battled Stage 4 neuroblastoma, which required surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation and two bone-marrow transplants. When Hannah achieved remission, Shroyer felt the tug to give back to Johns Hopkins All Children’s, the hospital that had saved his child’s life. 

He reached out to Big Top Brewing and the Lucky Pelican Bistro in Lakewood Ranch about doing a beer-focused fundraising event. Their owners readily agreed, and Big Top created a special banana wheat ale called Hannah Banana. Lucky Pelican chipped in the barbecue. In September 2018, Brewing Up Awareness, held at Big Top, raised about $7,000, Shroyer says. The following year’s version pulled in roughly $13,000. They gave the money to All Children’s.

How did this cancer warrior pivot from a beer event to a fishing tournament? Simple answer: COVID-19. “We couldn’t do it in bars anymore,” Shroyer says. “But I remember saying, ‘I don’t think childhood cancer stops just because there’s a pandemic going on.’”

With the help of some key friends — folks he’d met during long hours on the oncology floor while tending to their sick children — Shroyer hatched the idea of taking the fundraiser outdoors, and coined it Casting For The Kids. All they had to do was build a fishing tournament from scratch. “This was before AI,” Shroyer quips.

Photo by Mark Wemple

Around this time, Shroyer had a meeting with another child cancer warrior, a famous one: Dick Vitale. “He said, ‘Listen, I admire you wanting to donate to the hospital, to research, but when you’re talking about the money you’re bringing in, it’s a drop in the bucket,’” Shroyer remembers. “He was like, ‘but think about how much that money could help families?’ And I’m like, ‘You’re not wrong.’”

The first Casting For The Kids tournament was held Sept. 26, 2020, and featured 20 boats angling for cash prizes and trophies. With money from sponsorships and on-site donations, the inaugural event raised $25,000, which the organization used to help families pay for rent, mortgages, car payments and maintenance, Christmas presents and other necessities. “There were days on the cancer floor where you would hear kids screaming for mom and dad,” Shroyer says, his raspy voice rising. “No parent should have to worry about not being able to stay in the hospital with their kid because they have to work, or figuring out how to keep the lights on. They need to worry about their child.”

In 2021, Casting For The Kids garnered $50,000; the third year leaped to $117,000 and the fourth to $175,000. The 2024 edition, held between two major hurricanes, still reeled in nearly $86,000. This year saw a dip to about $75,000. Shroyer is puzzled that the event had the largest number of boats but the lowest amount of donations, but he’s undeterred.

Shroyer runs Casting For The Kids essentially on his own from a home office and credits his board of directors for providing essential help. He puts in “every bit of 40 hours a week,” he says. His 2025 salary was $45,000. “It’s definitely not a livable wage,” he adds. That’s why he’s also a real estate agent, selling houses on the side. His wife, Ginger, works as a trauma registrar at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. 

Hannah Shroyer is now 10. A year after her doctors saw no evidence of neuroblastoma, she was stricken at age 4 with a brain tumor, which required surgery and two years of chemo. It came at a cost. “She wears hearing aids now because the chemo caused her to lose her hearing,” Shroyer says. “She has a lot of life-long effects, and she’s going to have to deal with them.”

Shroyer pauses, then adds, “But at the end of the day, she’s still here.”