By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor


With his 53rd birthday set to arrive just a week after New Year's Day, Matt Herren is older than the vast majority of his fellow Bassmaster Elite Series competitors – and more than twice as old as some. Nonetheless, the Alabamian thinks some of his best seasons are ahead of him.

The former auto-body repairman, who launched his tour-level career at the relatively advanced age of 40, has finished among the Top 15 in the Angler of the Year (AOY) race in 3 of the past 4 seasons. He'll make his sixth appearance in the Bassmaster Classic at Oklahoma's Grand Lake in March.

He's a much more well-rounded angler now than he was when made his pro debut back in 2003. In fact, he's considerably more versatile than he was in '06, when he was the runner-up to Anthony Gagliardi for the FLW Tour AOY.

He previously had two major weaknesses – Florida and smallmouths. Nowadays, he has no trepidation about fishing in the Sunshine State or pursuing the bronzebacks of the North Country.

"There's some things I don't want to go into because it'd be like handing somebody the gun to shoot me with, but I finally got an understanding of why I struggled with smallmouths and it really swaps over to Florida," he said. "I was making the same mistakes in both places. A lot of it is confidence in techniques and baits and understanding why you're doing what you're doing, but a lot of it was self-inflicted by the way I was fishing.

"When it all clicked a couple years ago, Florida started happening and smallmouths started happening."

An Ongoing Education

The 2016 campaign will be Herren's 14th at the tour level, but he doesn't consider himself among the sport's grizzled veterans. For instance, he has only about half of the pro experience of Kevin VanDam, even though VanDam is 4 years his junior.

"As long as I keep learning, I think I can do well," he said. "I came along as a middle-aged guy and I watched some of the struggles that the older guys went through. The biggest thing I've learned is that guys get complacent, but I haven't gotten complacent – I'm still as hungry as I was when I first started.

"As long as I stay healthy – and I've got an exercise program I do in the off-season – I think I have many more good years to come. I don't feel like I'm 52."

He was remarkably consistent this past season en route to an 11th-place finish in the points. His lone bomb was at the Sacramento River/California Delta, where a broken prop on day 1 prevented him from weighing a 19-pound stringer and instead relegated him to a zero for the day.

"The next day, the only way I could get even a single point was to go out and catch a 30-pound bag, so I just went sight-fishing for big ones. Even a 50th-place finish in that one would've done a lot for me."

Learned from Mistakes

Herren is nearly 3 years removed from his worst Elite Series season (he finished 77th in the points in 2013). That came on the heels of a 6th-place AOY showing and he went into that year with a different mindset.

"I wanted to win a tournament so bad I couldn't stand it and I kind of gambled and sold out trying to do that the whole year, and it burned me," he said. "I missed the Guntersville Classic and that really hurt. The bottom line is that to win, you've got to catch fish."

As 2016 approaches, he said his mental outlook is better than it's ever been and he's much more at ease with where he's at in his career.

"I've always been kind of uptight and I've stressed over too much stuff. The big thing is when you're trying to establish yourself, you don't ever really get to enjoy it. You're trying to become one of the guys that sponsors want to gravitate to and you've got your nose to the grindstone and your blinders on and you're not even looking at what's around you.

"One day my wife and I were talking and I made some comment about something or other that I still needed to do, and she said, 'You know, someday this will all be over and you'll have never enjoyed a minute of what you've done. You still need to push, but you need to enjoy it because this is your dream.'

"That kind of snapped me out of it, and now I'm determined to enjoy the rest of the time I get to do this."