Round and round he goes …
Kyle Welcher has spun all over the point standings in 2025, up and down and round and round. After consecutive Top 10 finishes, he’s feeling way more comfortable in his quest to qualify for a fourth Bassmaster Classic.
A slow start to the season was erased with a victory in the third event. He then went through a rough patch before ascending back up the ladder. Welcher doesn’t really understand why his season, which along with the win included an 82nd-place finish, has been so inconsistent.
“A lot of times, 80th is actually really, really close to 30th,” the 32-year-old from Opelika, Ala., said. “There’s just a few tiny things that can go differently.
“I really feel like I have found the right fish in practice and fished the right styles to make an AOY run this year. But it just hasn’t come together.”
Welcher never missed a cut in winning the 2023 Progressive Bassmaster Angler of the Year title. This year, he’s posted some crooked numbers while earning the bulk of his points with three Top 10s. While he said he doesn’t look at points – people do tell him — he’s well aware of the projected Classic cut of 41st.
“It’s going to take probably around 530 points to make the Classic,” Welcher said. “If you Top 10, you make third, you get 102 points. That’s huge. You get 20% of the points you need in one tournament, and you make up a lot of ground.
“If you’re 30th to 50th, you don’t move a lot — 90th or Top 10, you move a ton.”
In his three Top 10s, Welcher has earned 306 of his 468 points, or 65%, moving up significantly after each. Just two events ago, Welcher was 55th in AOY. The climb back up began with his fifth-place finish at the Sabine, and a third at Tenkiller moved him 16th.
After a 69th at St. Johns and 34th at Okeechobee, Welcher scored his first Elite title, a record-setting win at the Pasquotank River. Earning 104 points pushed Welcher 32 spots up the standings to 17th. Two subpar finishes, 82nd at Hartwell and 73rd at Fork, however, had him plummet back outside the cut.
The second day has been his bugaboo in his three missed cuts, Welcher said.
“Just over and over, that seems to be the case,” he said. “It just didn’t come together three times this year. I don’t know why.”
At Fork, Welcher weighed 24 pounds, 6 ounces to stand 21st after Day 1. He caught a 7-11 on Day 2, but it was his only fish. He called that fall “catastrophically bad.”
“For the rest of the year, I told myself I catch a limit every day, and I’ll make the Classic,” he said.
The key at Sabine and Tenkiller, two events where he believed specific patterns would prevail, was spending most of practice looking for oddball spots.
“I feel like whenever we’re fishing the bank and it’s really hot,” he said, “I spend a lot of my time looking for an off-the-wall place, one of those little places to get an extra bite or two to kind of separate you.
“I always want to have a little bit of milk-run stuff. If I got five or six of those places, even if I only get one bite, it still helps separate you.”
After two days of fishing pressure, that tack seems to have paid off. Welcher has landed the biggest Day 3 limit at both Tenkiller (16-13) and Sabine (11-3), where he moved from 29th into Championship Sunday.
The Sabine was also the location for his monster move in 2023. After five events, Welcher stood fifth in the standings, 72 points behind Brandon Cobb. He took over the top spot with an 84-point swing.
“That was a big one, for sure,” said Welcher, who finished seventh to Cobb’s 91st. “Cobb had a bad one. Without that, it’s obviously a different race.”
Cobb regained the lead by one point after St. Clair, but Welcher finished strong with a 25th at Champlain then went for broke and took fifth at the St. Lawrence River, topping Cobb for the title by 24 points.
Welcher made more memories this year at the Pasquotank. Totaling 118-12, he added the first-time Elite venue to the Century Club list, and his 45-7 margin of victory blew away the previous mark by 16 pounds. That feat still hasn’t really sunk in, he said.
“To be honest, no. I just wanted to win,” said Welcher, who sewed it up on Day 3 when the Phoenix Boats Big Bass (10-8) gave him the event’s CrushCity Monster Bag of 34-0. “I don’t think about the margin.
“That was just a miracle. The only reason that happened is because we’d never been there before. I think it’s got to be a lake that has that kind of potential and no history. For somebody to do that much better than the field, not trying to be arrogant or nothing, but it takes both of those things.”
With two events left, Welcher knows a second AOY is out of reach, considering he’s 130 points behind points leader Jay Przekurat. His goal is to keep fishing well as the circuit closes with August tournaments at Lake St. Clair and the Mississippi River out of La Crosse, Wis.
There are two anglers tied for the final Classic spot at 410 points. With 58 points of headroom, Welcher only needs to finish about 70th or better in each event. A bomb at St. Clair could cause some sweat, but he’s dead set on spinning another Classic berth, not spinning out.
