Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
You won’t believe how tight last year’s AOY race was!
The importance of a good start in a bass tournament is critical. It is often the difference between winning and losing, and the value of a good start is just as important if you’re talking about winning Progressive Angler of the Year as it is when you’re talking about an individual event. For proof, let’s look at the starts of the NPFL Anglers of the Year through the first four seasons of the League.
In 2021, eventual AOY Keith Carson started strong with a 13th place finish at the season opener on Alabama’s Lake Eufaula. A year later, Gary Adkins led off by finishing 15th at Lake Cumberland in Kentucky. in 2023, Todd Goade finished 10th at Pickwick Lake in Tennessee, and last year Kyle Welcher was 7th at Alabama’s Logan Martin. They all went on to win AOY and none of them started the season by finishing worse than 15th.
That’s impressive, and it speaks volumes about what it takes to win the most prestigious title in the big leagues of professional fishing. If you want to win AOY at the highest levels, you need to start off with a bang, not a whimper.
Can a top-notch angler start off near the bottom and climb out of the hole to win AOY? Maybe, but there are two big obstacles.
First, there are only six tournaments in the NPFL season, so there aren’t a lot of opportunities to right the ship once it’s off-course.
Second, a bad finish in the opener means there will be a lot of anglers between you and the top. That’s a lot of talented “sticks” to leapfrog over. Plus, it means that each and every one of them will have to stumble to allow a “tortoise” to catch a bunch of “hares.”
One of the harshest examples of the importance of a fast start occurred just last year. In the season opener, Kyle Welcher started strong. He finished 7th at Logan Martin. Eventual second place finisher in the AOY race was Drew Cook, who came to the scales on Day 1 of that event with just four keeper bass—one short of a limit. It was the only day of the entire season that Cook failed to weigh in a limit.
Cook ended up finishing 15th in the opener, eight places and eight points behind Welcher.
How did they end the season? Welcher ended the season with 1,458 Progressive AOY points. Cook finished with 1,450—exactly eight points back.
Not only was the first tournament between these two top anglers the entire difference between their AOY finishes, but you could accurately say that it all boiled down to the first day of that first tournament.
That Drew Cook came in one bass short of a limit in Event One on Day 1 was the only difference in their seasons. The rest of the year, they were in a dead heat and accumulated exactly the same number of AOY points.
Start early. Start strong. Never take your foot off the gas.
Any angler with his sights set on AOY needs to “think points” from the very beginning of the season.
