PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. — A year after breezing to the Angler of the Year title in record fashion during his first season competing on a national tour, Banks Shaw got a reality check in 2026.
His Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit season started with, at the time, his worst finish as a boater in nearly three years. He had to navigate the fallout from a boat fire early in the year. He never held a comfortable lead in this season’s AOY race, with the battle coming down to the final day of Stop 6 Presented by VOSKER at Lake Champlain.
Yet in the end, Shaw emerged holding the 7 Brew Angler of the Year trophy for the second year in a row. With a third-place finish on Champlain, he topped Ryan Lachniet by 15 points to win a new Phoenix Boats package worth $50,000. And by some measures, his 2026 season was even better than 2025.
“Last year was an incredible year,” Shaw said on stage shortly after clinching the AOY crown. “The goal was this year just to top that year. I was like, man, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that. Somehow, here we are – we topped last year’s season.”
Bouncing back from a slow start
From the outset, defending his Pro Circuit points title was always going to be more difficult for Shaw than winning it in the first place. His dominant 2025 campaign, during which he made the Top 10 at all seven events on the then-Invitationals, earned him a spot on the Bass Pro Tour as well as an expanded sponsorship portfolio, both of which demanded lots of time and focus.
“I mainly wanted to prioritize the Bass Pro Tour and potentially give some of those guys a run for AOY,” Shaw said of his mindset entering the season. “But it turned out, the schedule would go to a Pro Circuit event, and then we would go straight to a Bass Pro Tour event. So, it kind of seemed like I was more prepared for a lot of the Pro Circuit events.”
Of course, Shaw wasn’t going to give up his crown without a fight. But it took just one event for him to think he’d blown his shot at a repeat.
In Pro Circuit season-opener on the Harris Chain, a cold front made the bite brutal for just about everyone, Shaw included. He weighed just one bass on Day 2 and nearly missed his first cut as a touring pro. He wound up finishing 35th – still good enough to earn a check, but a shock to an angler who had gone eight-for-eight in making Top 10s at national-level events to that point in his life.
“It bothered me quite a bit,” Shaw said. “The conditions were horrible, just super cold, and I lost a couple good fish during that tournament. I felt like I just threw it all away.”
Shaw bounced back with an eighth-place finish on Santee Cooper, then quickly reasserted himself as the AOY favorite with a comeback win at Stop 3 on Wheeler Lake. That put him back atop the points standings.
However, at the following event on Douglas Lake, Shaw stumbled again (at least by his lofty standards). He finished 17th, which allowed event winner and Shaw’s longtime friend Carter Nutt to gain a 13-point advantage over him atop the AOY standings.
“It was one I thought I was going to do really well in,” Shaw said of Douglas. “I thought maybe then (AOY) might have been kind of out the door as well. But I was just thinking, like, I knew Eufaula – that was our next tournament, and I knew that was an event where anybody could slip up, just because it was a super tough fishery.”
That feeling proved prescient. While the points count the same in every event, if there’s one that played the biggest role in Shaw defending his AOY title, it was the penultimate stop of the season on Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula. Nutt stumbled, weighing just two bass on Day 2 and finishing 34th, and Shaw charged through the open door. He moved up the leaderboard each day, vaulting from 27th to third to first and reclaiming the points lead in the process.
Entering the season, one of Shaw’s primary goals was to convert more of his close calls into wins (he finished between second and fourth place at seven events in 2025). Now, he believes closing out wins is one area he’s even better than he was a year ago. Eufaula marked one of two Pro Circuit triumphs and four total victories on the year, which helped him nearly double his earnings total from 2025. He’s already cashed more than $558,000 in 2026 with several more high-paying events left on the schedule.
“That was one of the biggest goals coming into this season from how many close finishes I had last year,” Shaw said. “I think I had like a 4-point-something average finish on the Pro Circuit, and I only won one event. I was like, man, I can definitely turn these into wins if I play my cards right. And I’m just glad I was able to win two this year.”
Sealing the deal at Champlain
Shaw followed up the win on Eufaula with his first Bass Pro Tour victory on Grand Lake. No surprise, he arrived at Champlain brimming with confidence.
But after strong winds hampered practice for him and everyone else, Day 1 didn’t start as well as Shaw had hoped. And with Lachniet 13 points behind him entering the event, he knew he couldn’t afford to slip up.
So, Shaw did what he does better than perhaps any pro in the game: He figured out something new on the fly. After not catching a single largemouth during practice, he weighed three green bass over the first two days. Without them, he estimated he would have had about 18 pounds per day, which would have put him around 25th place and needing a rally to run down Lachniet on Day 3.
“I planned on strictly fishing for smallmouth, and I ran all my stuff Day 1 when I only had 18 pounds after using my forward-facing, and none of that stuff panned out,” Shaw explained. “So, I pretty much just completely scratched that. I didn’t plan on fishing for largemouth – I tried it in practice and didn’t catch anything at all, not even a single largemouth. And I just went and did it.”
Nutt, who has known Shaw since their junior years of high school and fished alongside him at the University of North Alabama, said Shaw has always had a knack for “thinking like a fish.” But he pointed to Shaw’s ability to adapt during a tournament as his biggest area of improvement and a major reason why he’s won back-to-back points titles.
“He just gets dialed in on a bite very quickly, and he’s very good at expanding on what he does during a tournament,” Nutt said.
Entering the final day in eighth place, Shaw still didn’t technically have the title clinched. He figured he’d need around 18 pounds to get it done. It took all of about 15 minutes from the time he made his first cast until he put more than 20 pounds of smallmouth in the livewell and removed any doubt.
Shaw’s 21-14 limit marked the best Day 3 of anyone in the field and the fourth time in six events that he’s caught his biggest bag on Day 2 or 3.
“I knew I had AOY won – as long as I made it back (to weigh-in) – in the first 15 minutes,” Shaw said. “It was insane. The spot I had, it kept on getting better.”
A historic two-year run
Even with this year’s Championship still to come, Shaw has a strong claim to the best two-year run in the history of the Pro Circuit/Invitationals/FLW Tour. Three prior anglers have won AOY in back-to-back seasons – David Dudley in 2011-12, Andy Morgan in 2013-14 and Michael Neal in 2021-22. However, of those three, no one logged more than two wins and seven Top 10s during their two-year reign (both marks set by Dudley). Shaw is up to three wins and 11 Top 10s in 13 Pro Circuit events.
Include his stats from other tours, and his success becomes even more mind-boggling. Since the start of the 2025 season, Shaw has racked up five wins and 24 Top 10s in 30 solo MLF events. After cashing another $18,100 at Champlain, he’s over $900,000 in career earnings. With one more Bass Pro Tour event, the Pro Circuit Championship and the Toyota Series Championship all still to come, there’s a real chance he could eclipse the mark set just last fall by Drew Gill and become the youngest millionaire in MLF/FLW history by year’s end.
That might be the scariest part for Shaw’s competition. He just turned 23 on Wednesday. When asked where he’d rank Shaw among touring pros, Nutt didn’t hesitate.
“There’s nobody that I would put above him,” Nutt said. “There’s people that have a whole lot more accomplishments and a lot more winnings, but they’ve just been doing it for longer than him. Him in 20 years is going to be pretty incredible.”
No matter where Shaw’s career takes him, he won’t forget this season anytime soon. The adversity he overcame made him understand just how special his 2025 season was. Learning that lesson while still winning twice, cashing more than half a million dollars and maintaining his perch on the Pro Circuit throne isn’t something he’ll take for granted.
“It made me kind of realize how hard it is to win one of these AOYs,” he said. “Because last year, it felt pretty easy. I definitely put in the work and everything for those finishes, but it was like, everywhere I went, I couldn’t do wrong, and nobody was really competing with me. So, this year, it definitely opened my eyes. It showed me what it really means to have the best average after a full season.”
7 Brew Angler of the Year Final Standings:
- Banks Shaw – 1141 points
- Ryan Lachniet – 1126
- Drew Gill – 1096
- Connor Jacob – 1087
- Carter Nutt – 1075
- Brody Campbell – 1073
- Will Harkins – 1072
- Cal Lane – 1058
- Ethan Fields – 1054
- Dylan Nutt – 1049