He went up to pre-practice for four days before the lake went off-limits and knocked off his lower unit after less than a day of practice. Things got worse from there. “It seemed like anything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” he recalled. 

Despite the disappointment in New York, which culminated with a 76th place finish that left him 8 points behind McCaghren in the ROY race, Herren left the Empire State having achieved his primary goal, qualifying for the upcoming Lay Lake Classic. 

“I would have liked to win Rookie of the Year, but with them pulling the money out, it wasn’t that big a deal,” he said. “if it still paid $25,000 and a Toyota truck, it would have been a different ballgame.”

Satisfying Switch to BASS
Herren makes clear that he did not dislike the FLW Tour or its schedule, but that the circuit’s prohibitions on individual sponsor promotion made last year’s switch to the Elite Series a logical move. Still, he came over during the worst economic times in decades, so while he gained the ability to promote his corporate partners, he wasn’t fully able to reap the benefits of that freedom. “The economy had take a downturn so I never saw the economic benefits, and this year everybody’s made the decision to cycle back,” he said. “But I’m maintaining (my sponsor support), which is really a good thing at this time.”

Unlike more conventional first-year competitors, the competition level didn’t awe Herren. In the years that he fished FLW, he competed against many of them, either at the Tour level or in FLW Series events, and he was highly competitive.

“I’ve said all along that during the time I fished FLW, a lot of the bigger sticks crossed over,” he said. “Denny was there. Tommy was there. Rick was there. Even Kevin was there. The biggest difference was the two and a half day practice period. That required a change in my practice regimen.”

Looking back at the year, he feels that he more than held his own when there was a level playing field. He said that of the eight Elite Series tournaments, BASS had previously held events on the same waters at the same time of year in previous Elite Series years. In those tournaments – Amistad, Guntersville, Kentucky Lake and Oneida – he missed the cut, but when they visited new bodies of water, or went to previous stops at different times of year, he made the money all four times. In fact, he had a chance to win two of them, finishing 9th at Dardanelle, and taking the runner up spot at Smith Mountain Lake. 

The one tournament he’d like to have back is Guntersville, where his substantial experience on the waterway hurt him and he finished a season’s worst 83rd. “They wrecked me there,” he said. “That lake had never fished that way in its history. I tried to do what the fish were supposed to be doing and it didn’t work. In these tournaments, you can’t go in with any preconceived notions.”

Given his realization after Guntersville, he hopes to avoid a similar fate on another body of water he knows intimately, Lay Lake, site of the upcoming Classic.

Laying Off Lay
Herren has spent hundreds if not thousands of days on Lay Lake over the years, and has won tens of thousands of dollars there, but in some respects it’ll be a new experience for him.

“I haven’t fished a tournament on that lake in 5 or 6 years,” he said. “But up until that time I won a bunch of tournaments there.” That prior knowledge may come into play, or it may not. Herren suspects that the lake has changed since the last time he visited, largely as a result of a stocking program spearheaded by Mark’s Outdoors, a local tackle store. The store holds an annual 500-plus boat tournament in which each boat is given a bag of fingerlings to release.

In order to pursue that “in the moment” strategy, he’ll spend the pre-practice period doing just about anything but fishing Lay Lake. “I ain’t going down there,” he said. “I’m intentionally staying away.”

This time the stakes will be bigger than they were at Oneida, and this time there will be no playing it safe. Herren may have professed that he was not overly disappointed to have McCaghren pass him at Oneida, but at Lay Lake, he said, he won’t hold anything back.