HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Bass Pro Shops REDCREST Presented by MillerTech brought viewers a fresh take on Lake Guntersville with a familiar ending. Dustin Connell defended his REDCREST crown and entered rare territory by becoming just the third pro ever with three tour championship wins. He did so by bucking Guntersville’s ample history, running roughly 70 miles each day from takeoff at Civitan Park to the tailrace beneath the Nickajack Dam and catching a mixture of all three bass species.
In case you missed it, you can read all about Connell’s victory here. But with 50 of MLF’s best on the water for more than 30 hours of competition, that was far from the only interesting storyline. Here’s a few more worthy nuggets from a historic event.
Strong showing for Strader
Connell has not only shown a knack for winning but doing so in runaway fashion. Prior to REDCREST, four of his six prior Bass Pro Tour victories had come by at least 15 pounds.
Several times on Sunday, it looked like this would turn into another rout. And while Connell did hold the lead for the entirety of the final two periods, Wesley Strader never backed down, keeping it competitive until lines out.
Like Connell, Strader took the risk of running to the northernmost reaches of Lake Guntersville every day of the event, where the Tennessee native noted he’d spent plenty of time on the water in the past. His plan worked almost perfectly – he just didn’t count on having company from the reigning REDCREST champ.
“I saw where I was going to win at; I saw it in my head,” Strader said. “I saw the banks – every move I made was what I saw in my head, but the guy I didn’t see there was Dustin Connell.
“I went there the first day of practice, and I knew right away, this is where I’m going. And then I fished down the lake the last two days of practice, and you could tell they were in a little bit of a funk. They were in between spawning, some were spawning, the water was all mucked up from the pollen. And there’s just a million boats down there. So, I wanted to get away from the crowd. And it worked out. It just didn’t work out quite as well as I thought it would.”
Still, Strader deserves commendation for his performance. He finished among the top seven names on SCORETRACKER® every day of the event. His Championship Round game plan, which saw him start in a difficult-to-access backwater where he caught largemouth on a bladed jig and swim jig, then progress to catching smallmouth off steep banks on the main river, worked beautifully. His Sunday total of 79 pounds, 6 ounces would have led the way on every other day of competition.
The runner-up finish marked Strader’s best showing in 26 career tour championship events. It’s also his highest finish in Bass Pro Tour competition. In fact, only once since his last win in 2018 had Strader previously finished among the top three, at Lake of the Ozarks in 2022.
Another Top 10 for Birge
Obviously, Connell’s REDCREST track record can’t be matched. But another angler who seems to deliver his best performances on the biggest stage, Zack Birge, rose to the occasion again on Guntersville.
Birge wound up in third place, the highest finisher of all the anglers who stayed on the main body of Guntersville rather than venturing upriver. That marked his fourth time in the top six across five REDCREST appearances. He got there despite a penalty that forced him to sit out all of Period 1 on the opening day of competition, too – he still finished fourth in the Qualifying Round. It feels like just a matter of time until Birge breaks through and wins the championship trophy.
Lawrence keeps stellar rookie season rolling
Anyone who has competed on Kentucky Lake or Pickwick in the past five years or so knew that Jake Lawrence was a hammer. Lawrence’s numbers at the local level have been eye-popping – across 2023 and 2024, he racked up three wins and six Top 10s in Phoenix Bass Fishing League competition plus two wins and four Top 10s (in just four events) at the Toyota Series level. He won the Fishing Clash Angler of the Year title in the Plains Division last season.
Perhaps even more impressive is how Lawrence has kept it rolling as he’s taken his career farther from home and to higher levels of competition. Lawrence, a Bass Pro Tour rookie who qualified for REDCREST thanks to his Tackle Warehouse Invitationals win on Lake Eufaula in 2024, has now finished among the Top 10 in three of his first four BPT events after a fifth-place showing on Guntersville.
Clearly, it doesn’t matter the format or location – Lawrence can straight up catch them. However, with the next two regular-season events slated for more Tennessee River fisheries (including Stage 5 on Kentucky Lake), Lawrence should be particularly well positioned to keep his hot streak going.
Big G breaks records
Volatile weather, fish moving in and out of spawning areas and a lot of pollen in the water (which made both forward-facing sonar and sight-fishing challenging) resulted in a tricky bite on the main body of Guntersville. Still, the legendary lake produced several REDCREST records:
- Connell’s winning weight of 87 pounds, 11 ounces represented the heaviest total for any REDCREST winner, narrowly topping Edwin Evers’ mark of 85-6 at the inaugural championship on the Mississippi River in 2019. This event also edged the 2019 records for the heaviest leading weight and cut weight at the conclusion of the two-day Qualifying Round.
- Across the entire event, the field caught 1,614 scorable bass totaling 4,546 pounds, 4 ounces. Both of those numbers marked REDCREST highs – despite the fact that this event lasted four days, while the first four iterations of the event spanned five.
- Jeff Sprague caught a 9-0 beast on the opening day that not only won Berkley Big Bass honors with ease; it marked the heaviest fish ever to hit the scales at REDCREST.