A high-level professional fishing competition is coming to Beaver Lake next year. Stage Five of the Major League Fishing Bass Pro Tour will take place April 30 through May 3, 2026. Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis reached out to MLF Senior Communications Director Joe Opager to learn more about the event and pro fishing.
Turns out Opager and pro fishing have a history in Rogers and on the waters of Beaver Lake.
Joe Opager: I used to work for a company named FLW, and the Walmart FLW Tour for a period in the early 2000s up until about 2016 was the top circuit in the sport. It featured pro anglers competing across the country for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And of course, we had an annual stop there at Beaver Lake, being the home of Walmart, our title sponsor. And so every year we would have a big tournament at Beaver Lake. All the fans would come out to see us at the weigh-ins, and it was a really, really great, positive event for us.
In 2019, FLW was acquired by Major League Fishing. And as a part of that, all of the staff—and I’d like to call it the circus that lives in Benton, Kentucky—came along as part of that. And so we have been clamoring to get back to Beaver Lake, and we finally were able to make that happen next year. Our partners at Destination Rogers reached out to us and let us know that they wanted us back in town. Our schedule workers went to work, and we were able to find some dates that worked for everybody. And we’re just super pumped about bringing back the top professional anglers in the entire sport to Beaver Lake in Rogers, Arkansas.
Travis: Is this a spectator-friendly event? Are people going to want to come out and be there in person?
Opager: There’s actually quite a bit that goes on surrounding these events. This is going to be a four-day event, April 30 through May 3, Thursday through Sunday. Typically, we livestream the entire event, so fans are going to get to tune in and see these guys on the water for the first three days of competition—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Then on Saturday and Sunday, on the weekend, we hold a big MLF watch party and fan activation where we’ll have a huge inflatable movie screen out at the park. Fans are going to be able to come out, watch the guys on the water live, and then as competition ends, they’ll return to the marina. They’ll go up on stage, talk about their day a little bit, and then they’re signing autographs, telling stories, shaking hands.
So there’s a lot going on, from being able to watch these guys on the water, to lots of stuff for the kids to do. The anglers are going to be on the water, but there’s going to be a lot of stuff for fans to do as well.
Travis: Seems like people will be able to walk away with a lot of free swag and some fishing rods and stuff like that too.
Opager: Absolutely. Usually there are multiple sponsors out there, and everybody’s got some different goodies. It’s a little different from the FLW Tour we used to have, where we would hold the live fish weigh-ins. Fans would come out and wouldn’t actually know the results until they saw the anglers weighing in their bass on stage and on the scale. With the Bass Pro Tour, everything takes place live. Everyone knows the score at all times through our ScoreTracker leaderboard. So fans are going to get to watch like a real sporting event. They’ll watch it end, and then they’ll get to see the guys in person and talk to them after. It’s a real party atmosphere and a celebration of the outdoors.
Travis: Let’s put this into some context for people who might not be as familiar with pro fishing. Who can people expect to watch compete at Beaver Lake, and why will it be cool to watch these athletes specifically?
Opager: We definitely have the biggest names in bass fishing in the Bass Pro Tour, and they’ll be there next spring. Guys like Edwin Evers, Jacob Wheeler, Ott DeFoe, Dustin Connell, Mark Daniels Jr. These guys have massive social media followings. They’re the best anglers in the sport. Jacob Wheeler has won our Angler of the Year title four out of the last five years. He’s just been on an incredible roll that many are claiming is the best run in professional bass fishing history right now.
All of these guys are going to be coming to northwest Arkansas on Beaver Lake. Probably even earlier than the event—you’ll see guys in the area coming up early to practice. We haven’t been there since 2017, so the lake has changed quite a bit, and guys are going to have to get reacquainted with it. These guys are the best in the world, and we’re going to watch them do that.
Travis: How does someone even become a pro angler?
Opager: That’s one of the great things about Major League Fishing—we have the system laid out. If your dream is to become a professional angler, you can do it through MLF. We have six different circuits that we run tournaments in, starting at the high school and college level. We hold no-entry-fee tournaments for anglers around the country to get some tournament experience and dip their toes in the water.
After those circuits, we hold one-day tournaments around the country through our BFL circuit—the biggest grassroots circuit in the country. We hold more than 128 events throughout the year for basically the average weekend angler, guys who have real jobs through the week but still want to compete in tournaments and dabble in pro bass fishing. The BFL is a great stepping stone. From there, you can advance to our Toyota Series, which is kind of our Double-A level, and then into our Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit, which is the only way to qualify into the Bass Pro Tour.
The Bass Pro Tour is the sport’s top level. These are the guys that are going to be coming to northwest Arkansas, but there’s a feeder system of guys competing in lower circuits to qualify into the Bass Pro Tour. Every year five guys are coming in. We’ve got five new rookies, and five guys that are not performing are unfortunately having to move back down. So it’s a great stepping-stone system.
And Major League Fishing has you covered even if you don’t own a boat. We have a division called a co-angler. They get randomly paired with a boater each day, and the co-anglers fish off the back of the boat and compete against other co-anglers. So if you’re interested in tournament fishing, you don’t even need to have a boat to compete in a Major League Fishing tournament, which is really cool.
Travis: That is very cool. Where can people go to learn more about the Bass Pro Tour Stage Five at Beaver Lake or just Major League Fishing in general?
Opager: Definitely follow us on social media. We’re on all the major platforms—Facebook, Instagram. We’ve got a really hot YouTube page that we’re really proud of and have been working on a lot lately. But also, just MajorLeagueFishing.com is the home of everything for us. We’ve got an event actually taking place right now that you can tune in and see—we’re up in Minocqua, Wisconsin.
Everything that we do is at MajorLeagueFishing.com, and you can break it out by circuits. You can look at the high school and college fishing anglers, like I had mentioned, and see where those tournaments are taking place. The BFLs are taking place every single weekend, so you can find a tournament near you or catch the latest results. Or just watch the best pros in the world compete on bodies of water close to you on our livestream. MajorLeagueFishing.com is where you can find all of that information.
I just want to reiterate again how excited we are to get back to Beaver Lake. That had been an annual stop on the FLW Tour for something like 20-some years. Our hosts, Destination Rogers and J.R. Shaw over there—these people became like family to us because we had been there so often. We’re so excited to get back. We’re so excited to see how the lake is doing.
It was one of the things we got to watch every year when we came back: the lake was getting better and better. Now we’ve given it an eight-year break, and we’ve heard that it’s a top-notch fishery right now, one of the best in the country. We can’t wait to get back to northwest Arkansas, and we hope all the fans will come out to see us again.
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