Editor’s note: This is part of a series in which The Athletic highlights offbeat sports you may not have known are contested at the college level. Follow the full series here.
In the summer of 2021, Max Benedict worked as a manager at a campground in Frederic, Mich. The gig was temporary, given that Michigan would be blanketed with snow in the coming months, and Benedict wasn’t feeling too hot about what was ahead.
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“I turned to the guy I was running the campground with, and I said, ‘You know what sucks? The only thing I like doing right now in my life is playing cornhole, and you can’t do that as a job,’” the 25-year-old said.
Months later, Indeed.com produced exactly that: a post asking for a head cornhole coach that paid more than the remote IT job Benedict hated.
“I screenshotted it, sent it to my friends and said, ‘This can’t be real.’”
Adrian College needed someone to lead its new cornhole team, which was already backed by Killshots Cornhole, a local bag and board manufacturer, so Benedict submitted an application and began preparing for an interview.
“This was December in Michigan. I’m outside in a big coat, throwing cornhole bags forever. I’m all nervous, but I felt confident, like ‘All right, I can show them. I can do some stuff,’” he said. “They asked me some stuff about practices, but they were more heavily interested in people skills, salesmanship, stuff like that.”
On Christmas Eve of 2021, Benedict got the offer. He didn’t throw a single cornhole bag in the interview process.
By January, the first organized collegiate cornhole program with a full-time coach was taking shape. On Benedict’s first day, Mike Duffy, the former Adrian College athletic director who retired in June 2022 after 17 years at the helm of the Division III school, offered few words of encouragement for his newest hire.
“Here’s a desk. Make cornhole.”
Benedict pieced together his inaugural team through an open tryout and helped the “Corndawgs,” as the Adrian athletes call themselves, sharpen their skills through five days of mandatory practice a week. The two-hour-long training sessions include drills that emphasize specific techniques and mini-challenges that Benedict designs to raise the stakes of practice.
“Some days — I won’t tell ‘em when because I want them to show up — we won’t even touch a bag,” Benedict said. “We’ll do meditation for an hour and then they can go.”
To most, cornhole is a backyard game. It’s a way to pass the time at tailgates or a low-risk activity everybody from grandmas to toddlers can take turns at during cookouts.
But to a growing community of players in the American Cornhole League (ACL) who often travel across multiple states to face the nation’s best bag tossers in organized tournaments, it’s an intricately strategic battle that demands an ice-in-your-veins mentality you wouldn’t think necessary for throwing bead-filled bags at a slanted wooden board.
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Outside of Benedict’s athletes, most players at the National College Cornhole Championship (NCCC) are self-taught and train independently, traveling to tournaments on their own dime. Reigning NCCC doubles winners Avery Snipes and Angel Camarena, who also led the University of South Carolina to the 2022 team championship a day after downing Oklahoma State to take the doubles title, drove nearly two hours round-trip three to four times a week to play in tournaments for practice.
“USC really had no clue that we even existed until after we won,” Camarena said with a laugh. “Then all the local (social media) pages were posting us.”
Austin Schlobohm took a similar self-guided route to sweep the singles and doubles events at the second NCCC in 2019. When he returned to the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, the 22-year-old was given a hero’s welcome with a banner over the student hall and a studded championship ring.
Reaching the peak of the collegiate cornhole scene, where national champions are awarded $2,500 for each event title they win and interviewed on ESPN, requires a level of practice and dedication akin to other sports recognized by the NCAA. Camarena estimates that he played 30 hours a week in the two months leading up to the championship while still going to school full-time — 10 hours more than the NCAA allows athletes on varsity teams to practice.
Serious cornhole competitors also need specific gear, namely ACL-approved bags filled with resin pellets rather than corn. A set of four retails for roughly $100, and the bags, like baseball gloves, need a little roughing up before they’re competition ready.
“The floppier bags, they just fall in the hole better. Any time you get a corner in the hole, it’s usually gonna go,” Schlobohm said. “I like my bags to feel like a dishrag. As floppy as can be and as soft as can be.”
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But, it is possible to have a bag that’s too floppy.
“It’s like throwing a Ziploc bag filled up with a handful of sand,” Snipes said. “That would be very hard to throw.”
To break in the set he and Camarena used at the 2022 championships, Snipes put fabric softener on the bags, soaked them in hot water for around half an hour, then threw them in the washing machine and let them tumble dry with no heat. By the time the duo won its doubles title, the bags were about 15 months old.
“They were starting to turn from a royal blue to a very disgusting navy blue,” Snipes laughed.
Light up the capstone! 💡 Angel Camarena and Avery Snipes of the University of South Carolina ( @UofSC ) took home the 2022 NCCC Doubles Championship title! 🏆 pic.twitter.com/eV3NPBCklV
— American Cornhole League (@iplaycornhole) January 4, 2023
Beyond the bags and the boards (which also need to be regulated and cost around $400 per pair), those in the competitive cornhole community say games are won or lost between their ears.
“I 100 percent believe that cornhole is 95 percent mental and five percent a little bit of skill, little bit of luck,” Snipes said. “There’s so much that goes on within a cornhole match. The ebbs and flows, ups and downs. The momentum can be shifted in a heartbeat.”
Schlobohm, who is an ACL pro ranked No. 41 in the country in singles, likened it to a round of golf. “But in golf, you can hit one bad shot and have another shot that makes up for it. In cornhole, if you throw one bag off the back (of the board), you can’t get that bag back. You literally have to play to perfection to win.”
Up-and-comers like 18-year-old Kemberly Jenkins often feel that pressure while playing on the championship courts in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The Piedmont Technical College student remembers being intimidated not just by the bright lights and TV cameras but also by the weight of being her school’s lone representative and one of only a few women competing.
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She channeled her nerves into rooting for Zoey Gann, another female competitor in the singles event, to make the finals.
“I was rooting for her the whole way,” Jenkins said. “I told everybody, ‘I don’t care which one of us it is, as long as one of us makes it.’”
Though Gann missed advancing by one game, Jenkins ultimately finished tied for fifth out of 98 players and made history as the first woman to ever advance to the NCCC singles quarterfinals.
Seven points to Jenkins! 🙌 Kemberly Jenkins makes cornhole history by being the first female player to ever make it to the Singles quarterfinals of the National College Cornhole Championship! 🦾 pic.twitter.com/Wy72EJl6pG
— American Cornhole League (@iplaycornhole) January 9, 2023
Over 160 students representing more than 40 schools traveled to South Carolina last December to play in the 2022 NCCC. The tournament may be even bigger this year, as ACL College executive director Tyler Key said the league is aiming for 60-plus universities to participate.
“We’re trying to supply some equipment to universities big or small to help them get started,” he said. “Then we try to create an atmosphere where everyone feels welcome when they come to compete.”
The next goal, Key said, is to have enough schools field cornhole teams that the ACL can build its own college conferences that play consistently throughout the fall.
That level of growth may not be far off.
A year and a half after starting at Adrian College, Benedict is bringing cornhole to high schools around Adrian, with help from a midwestern supermarket chain. Meijer awarded a $20,000 grant to jumpstart the creation of a cornhole league in schools around the community, and it will culminate with a championship at Adrian College. Benedict also regularly fields calls from other colleges that are seeking advice on how to start their own programs, a resource he didn’t have on Day 1.
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It’s all still a little unbelievable to a former campground manager who may have spoken his dream job into existence two summers ago.
“It is goofy. It’s cornhole, at the end of the day. It’s ridiculous to tell people what I do,” he said. “But I think that’s what makes it fun.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of American Cornhole League)