The Midwest Walleye Challenge will welcome South Dakota for the 2025 event. South Dakota joins five other states: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, and Michigan (after May 15) who will be participating in the 2025 event.
The Midwest Walleye Challenge is a Citizen Science Fishing Event, which allows anglers to report their catches to their respective fisheries biologists. While not quite a traditional online fishing tournament, each state will offer $5,000 in prizes including the Grand Prize longest walleye.
The goal of this event is to provide high quality data regarding individual fisheries to biologists, which makes reporting all catches, and lack of catches too, critical.
“As anglers, what we experience out on the water each trip is critical information for fisheries biologists,” says Nick Harrington, Owner of Lip Ripper Fishing. “By sharing all the fish we catch, where we caught them from, and maybe most importantly when we don’t catch fish-we can provide valuable data to fisheries managers across South Dakota.”
Anglers participate by submitting their catches through the MyCatch mobile app, which collects information on both trips and catches. Anglers pay $25 to participate in the event, which makes them instantly eligible for a $20 gift certificate to Discount Tackle simply for reporting a valid trip.
There are several price categories including: Early Bird, Referral, Tough Luck, Most Fish Caught, Most Waterbodies Fished, Release Video, Longest Walleye, and Random Draw Prizes.
“The goal is complete information reporting,” elaborates Harrington. “Whether it’s a trophy, dink, or anything in-between, reporting every fish caught is critical. Even trips that are unsuccessful are important information as well.”
Most importantly anglers should feel confident their secret spots will not be compromised. Catch locations are not available to participants and biologists only receive information at the waterbody level.
“The important thing anglers need to be aware of is by sharing information on your trips, even if it’s to your favorite spots, you’re ensuring that biologists have the information they need to keep those fisheries healthy,” continues Harrington. “This is also a great way to try a new waterbody, I like to say that ‘zero’ is not the same as no data. Zero is absolutely data!”
The event begins April 1 and runs through June 29, 2025.
“I encourage every South Dakota angler to participate in this event,” concludes Harrington. “I’ve heard from many anglers that they would like to share their catch information with biologists, this is exactly how they can do that!”
