How To Run An Awesome Cornhole League

In the last article we gave you the basics of how to start an epic cornhole league. Now lets talk about how to run an awesome cornhole league. You have the venue, players and equipment and you know what type of league it will be so lets touch on the actual management and administration of the league and all the back end stuff that comes with it. A well managed, smooth running league will ultimately be the most fun for all the players. 

Run an Awesome Cornhole League

There are other ways to run an awesome cornhole league but we are going to focus one 1 of them in particular because it’s the way me and a couple of buddies run our league. We do a Round Robin league and find it to be the most fun for everyone and most fair for every skill level. 

Our league is a 10-week season of game play with the 11th week for playoffs. Each week, depending on how many people show up, players are randomly placed on a board with 4-7 other players. Each week, each player will play a minimum of 6 games. The total points you and your partner accumulate for that game, win or lose, count toward your total score for that week. The most points anyone can get in a week is 126 (6 games at 21 points per game).

Here is a sample 6-player round robin score sheet. You will notice that some boxes are white, some shaded and some blacked out. The white boxes are team 1 for that game, shaded boxes team 2 for same game and blacked out boxes are not playing this game. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

You must show up a minimum of 5 out of 10 weeks in order to rank for the playoffs. Which is usually not a problem for most because heck, we are all Cornhole Addicts and can never get enough. Reason for the minimum of 5 weeks is that only your top 5 scores count towards your overall ranking. So by showing up for 10 weeks, that allows you to have 5 “bad” weeks of throwing and still rank high.

At the end of the 10 weeks, depending on how many players make the playoffs, we divide them into 3 divisions. When we first started our league back in the Spring of 2018, we had 21 people in the playoffs and had an A & B Division. This last season which was Summer of 2019 we doubled to 42 and broke it up in an A, B & C Division.

And we pay out the top 3 spots in each. Depending on how many you have, you can keep it all 1 Division or break it into 2 or more. Remember, to run an awesome cornhole league you must keep it fun, fair and give everyone a chance to finish on top.

League Fees

You need to figure out how much it costs to join your league and how you are going to collect money from people. We used to collect a weekly fee and have just started, this season, collecting a lump sum all at once. With the weekly, you need to keep track of attendance and who paid. With the lump, once everyone is paid, you don’t need to worry about it anymore. One less thing to do to keep the league running smooth. Our league fees go towards our end of season playoff winners as well as the maintenance of the league like new boards, new bags, maintenance of equipment, etc.

League Administration 

We discussed how to run an awesome cornhole league and now it’s time to discuss the administration stuff. For this, it is best to find someone with computer skills. Someone that knows their way around Google Docs, MS Word/Excel, etc. This is where the time comes in. In the beginning, depending on your numbers, the time commitment is small but as the league grows, so does everything else.

At the end of the night, you will have your score sheets. Depending on how many players/boards you had will determine how much time is needed to enter all the scores. You will find that people will want to know their score that night and often calculate it themselves. This is ok but do not take what they write and use that. I suggest you to re-check all the scores yourself, just to be sure. Can’t tell you how many times we find wrong scores.

So now you are ready to enter the scores into the Ranking Sheet. We created an example using the Round Robin board sheet from above. You can see how we entered the players name, their score for the night and then sorted the sheet to show the players in the order hey rank. You will do this same process for each week the player plays. If they do not play a week, do not enter a zero, just leave it blank. The next step you will want to do is to take a snapshot of the sheet and post it on social media so all the players can see their scores and where they rank in the league. 

Social media is not only a great way to interact with everyone in the league but also great to attract new players so your league can grow. Make sure everyone knows exactly when and where you are playing. And take pictures, lots of pictures, to post on social media. Make a big deal out of it. “If you build it, they will come”!

If anyone wants to run an awesome cornhole league of their own using this format, you can contact me and I would be happy to supply you with the sheets we use and teach you how to use them properly. I am also happy to answer any questions so feel free to leave a comment or email us via our contact form above. I, personally, did not create these sheets. They were handed down from another league to me and I shared them with a couple other leagues over the last year. This format is fun and it works and it works great!

We ran out league this way for a couple of years but have since started using Scoreholio which we find much easier to use and manage. If you would like to run your league as described above, you can download the scoring sheets and the Excel spreadsheet needed.