After 11 seasons, two-time FLW Tour winner Ray Scheide is taking the 2015 season (and possibly more) off to evaluate his future in the sport.
The Dover, Ark., pro made the decision to forgo the upcoming season after the FLW team sponsor turmoil late last year left a number of anglers without a title sponsor. He’d been most recently associated with 3M/Peltor via FLW’s team sponsorship program.
“It was way after any corporations do their marketing budgets for the coming year and a week or two before deposits were due,” he said. “My decision was weighted on knowing that (fishing) is not my main means of income and maybe it was becoming a distraction from what is my main source of income. I didn’t want to put all of my money into it if it’s not going to be my main source of income.”
Rather than fish the Tour, he’ll focus more on his family’s screenprinting and digital graphics business Game Day Screen Printing, which opened three years ago and enjoyed record earnings in 2014.
“We’ve had good growth and we’re staffed with good employees that care about the business,” he said. “I may pursue some sponsors for the future, but with the limited time I had to work with, I felt it was right to sit out and see how it shakes out. Whether there’s a future with me coming back to fishing, we’ll see.”
He and his wife are also heavily involved with the River Valley Youth Fishing Team, a club he founded a few years ago that now pulls from eight different schools and operates a six-tournament season as well as hunting outings in the fall and spring.
While he’s not prepared to say he’s retiring, Scheide said he’ll miss the camaraderie with his competitors, many of whom became close friends over his decade-plus Tour tenure.
“I’ll definitely miss the guys,” Scheide said. “A lot of those guys are like family. That’s going to be an adjustment. I’ll miss the people the most.
“I’m probably not the first to say it, but I think I’m blessed in that the whole time I fished it wasn’t about how much money we made or how many trophies we had, it was about the relationships I made along the way. That’s what I’ll miss the most.”
