25 Anglers. One Championship. One Skeeter. | Lac Courte Oreilles Championship Preview

After a season filled with a rescheduled event, dramatic finishes and some of the closest competition in Champions Tour history, the field is finally set.

25 anglers have earned their way to the 2026 Champions Tour Championship on Lac Courte Oreilles in the Hayward Lakes Area, where the season-long battle will come down to one final event, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Presented by Skeeter and Yamaha and hosted by the Hayward Lakes Visitors and Convention Bureau, this event will determine this year's Champions Tour champion, while the winner will take home one of the biggest prizes in competitive fishing: a brand-new Skeeter ZX200 powered by a Yamaha SHO and equipped with Humminbird electronics and Minn Kota products.

For the 25 anglers who made the cut, the regular season is over. Now, it's time to finish the job and bring home a new Skeeter.

The Final 25

Look at the top of the standings and the storyline immediately feels familiar.

For the second consecutive season, Charlie Wright and Evan Blakley find themselves at the center of the Angler of the Year race heading into the Championship. Last season, Wright entered the Championship on Green Lake with the AOY lead, only to see Blakley put together the performance he needed to steal the title at the finish line.

Now, one year later, the two are right back where they started.

Wright enters Lac Courte Oreilles with 136 points, just 6 points ahead of Blakley at 130. That means the defending AOY storyline has essentially reset itself for another dramatic finale.

But there is still another name lurking behind them.

Zach Piescher sits at 121 points, just 15 behind Wright and 9 behind Blakley. If the two leaders stumble on Lac Courte Oreilles, Piescher could find himself right in the middle of the Angler of the Year conversation.

With three anglers separated by just 15 points, there is very little room for error.

While the battle for Angler of the Year will headline the Championship, another season-long award has already been decided.

Harrison Nelson has officially secured Rookie of the Year honors, becoming the only rookie to qualify for this year's Championship. Nelson has been one of the standout newcomers throughout the 2026 season, and his fifth-place position in the AOY standings is an impressive way to cap his first year on the Tour.

Welcome to the Hayward Lakes Area

For the Champions Tour, the Championship brings the field to one of Wisconsin's most storied fishing destinations.

Located roughly 135 miles from the Twin Cities, the Hayward Lakes Area is actually one of the closer Champions Tour destinations to the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro, but stepping into the region feels like entering an entirely different world.

Surrounded by forests and an incredible concentration of lakes, Hayward has built its identity around outdoor recreation and fishing. The area has long been synonymous with muskie fishing, but its reputation extends far beyond the fish of 10,000 casts.

The region is also home to the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, an institution whose roots in Hayward date back to 1960. Today, the museum complex houses more than 50,000 fishing artifacts, along with hundreds of mounted fish and roughly 1,000 antique outboard motors. More than 50,000 people visit the museum annually.

Muskies may have put Hayward on the fishing map, but the area's fishery has continued to evolve.

Walleye, panfish, northern pike and bass fisheries have become important parts of the region's identity, while smallmouth bass fishing has increasingly emerged as another reason anglers are making the trip north.

Lac Courte Oreilles, often simply called LCO, is one of the largest natural lakes in Sawyer County and one of the most diverse fisheries in the Hayward Lakes Area. The lake covers approximately 5,139 acres, reaches 90 feet at its deepest point, and features roughly 25 miles of shoreline.

For the Champions Tour field, however, it's what exists beneath the surface that makes LCO such an intriguing Championship venue.

The lake is largely a combination of sand, weeds and rock, with extensive shallow flats, offshore structure and scattered rock throughout the system. Add in an abundance of perch and crayfish, and the lake has no shortage of food for its population of smallmouth bass.

According to Champions Tour Pro Hayden Anderson, that combination of habitat and forage is exactly what could make LCO such a good Championship venue.

Anderson has spent plenty of time around the Hayward Lakes Area, and his first description of LCO paints a picture of a fishery that is far different from many of the lakes the Champions Tour anglers encountered earlier this season.

"The Hayward Area is known for a lot of cribs, or fish habitat, the DNR dumps them in," Anderson explained. "Some of the Hayward lakes have more than the others, LCO has quite a few. I like them when the water is colder but someone could find fish on some of them. That's definitely different from Minnesota."

Those cribs are just one piece of the puzzle.

Much of the Hayward fishery is built around weeds and sand, with isolated rock scattered throughout. On LCO, those weed patches can be especially important because of the forage they hold.

There's deep rock. Shallow rock. Weeds. Cribs. Offshore structure. Flats. And, under the right conditions, roaming fish suspended out over the basin.

"You've got everything," Anderson said.

That variety should also help spread the field across the lake.

"It's loaded with quality fish, so it'll set up well for the format," Anderson said. "A big one is 4 lbs. I wouldn't expect to see many over, but you'll see a couple. You're going to see a lot of 2-3 lb smallmouth which is going to be fun in that format."

And that's an important distinction for a Champions Tour Championship. Rather than requiring anglers to find a handful of giants, LCO will reward the angler who consistently finds quality fish throughout the day. Anderson believes there could be several different ways to build a bag. Some anglers may target deep rock. Others could focus on shallow rock or weedbeds. Cribs could produce. And if conditions line up, roaming smallmouth could become a major player.

There's even a chance that someone finds a secondary largemouth pattern.

"I never look for them but someone certainly is going to find them," Anderson said.

While largemouth may not be a major component of the fishery, Anderson believes one could still factor heavily into the Championship.

"There's not a lot of largemouth in the lake, but the big fish will probably be a largemouth," he said. "I'd guess the Maluna Big Bass will be a 5+ lb largemouth."

One of the biggest challenges facing the field will be separating the fish that consistently live in certain areas from the smallmouth that are constantly on the move. According to Anderson, there are areas of LCO that reliably hold fish during late summer, but that doesn't mean every pattern will last. There are certain locations that always seem to have fish, while other patterns can disappear almost as quickly as they develop.

That's simply part of chasing late-summer smallmouth.

And with 25 of the best anglers in the Champions Tour searching for them, the ability to adapt could be just as important as finding the right spot.

When it comes to presentations, Anderson expects several familiar smallmouth baits to play a major role. A jighead minnow, Ned rig and drop-shot should all be in the mix.

But there's another technique Anderson was hoping would make its appearance.

"I was hoping to be fishing it and to figure something out with an A-Rig," he said. "It typically is good late September and early October. So it might be early but it'll be coming on."

Whether the Alabama rig is ready to become a major player or not, the broader theme remains the same: anglers are going to have to be dialed in. The fish have seen their share of pressure over the past few years, particularly with the explosion of forward-facing sonar.

"The fish have definitely gotten smarter out there the past few years with the FFS pressure," Anderson said.

But there's an important caveat.

"With that said they're still a lot dumber than the Mille Lacs and Pokegama fish they targeted earlier in the year," Anderson chuckled.

That could be good news for the Championship field.

For all of the deep-water, structure oriented possibilities on LCO, Anderson isn't ruling out an old school shallow water explosion. If the crayfish are pushing into the flats and the conditions line up, the topwater bite could be one of the most exciting ways to put fish in the boat.

"If there is a shallow crayfish bite on the flats, I can totally see someone catching half a dozen fish or so in the morning on a topwater which will be really cool," Anderson said.

And that kind of bite could completely change the complexion of the Championship. A fast morning topwater flurry could give an angler an early cushion before transitioning to deeper fish later in the day.

"If I were fishing it, I would have been going for 35 smallmouth," he said.

Thirty-five smallmouth.

If an angler can average 2.25 to 2.5 pounds per fish, Anderson believes that could put them in the neighborhood of 75 to 80 pounds over the Championship.

That would be a good amount of weight, and a fitting target for what could be one of the most competitive events of the season.

For 25 anglers, the entire season has come down to this.

For Wright and Blakley, it's another chapter in an increasingly familiar AOY rivalry.

For Piescher, it's an opportunity to play spoiler.

For Nelson, it's a chance to cap a remarkable rookie season.

And for everyone else in the field, it's a shot at the biggest prize of the year.

At the end of the Championship, one angler will be crowned the 2026 Champions Tour Angler of the Year.

And one angler will leave the Hayward Lakes Area with a brand-new Skeeter ZX200 powered by Yamaha, complete with Humminbird electronics and Minn Kota products.

The season has taken us through rescheduled events, unpredictable conditions and dramatic finishes.

Now, it all comes down to Lac Courte Oreilles.

25 anglers. One Championship. One Skeeter.