For members of Red Wolves Cornhole, cornhole is more than a game, but rather, a professional sport and a way to unwind. 

The club was founded last semester by Sebastian Barger, a sophomore mathematics major from Paragould. 

“I’m a professional cornhole player myself. I have been for three years,” Barger said. “So I thought the students here would really like to have the opportunity to play the game. I thought it’d be fun for me to teach people.”

At the moment, 10-15 people show up to the meetings. Meetings are open to both students and the community.

The club is for people of all skill levels.

“We have multiple boards, so we can have multiple levels of play,” said Mitch Mathis, faculty adviser and instructor in the Health, Physical Education and Sports Sciences Department.  “So the higher skilled players can go down on one end, while the learners can still be on the other end and we can work with them and talk strategy and technique and those kinds of things.”

The meetings consist of bracket tournaments, with participants in a “switchholio,” where students are given random partners for four games. Winners of the switchholio go into a double elimination bracket until there’s a winner. 

Barger said new players can have difficulty handling the cornhole bags, as well as figuring out their play styles.

“They’re all kind of like, balled up and planted or whatever,” Barger said. “With cornhole, there’s two different sides to the bag, but one’s slow and one’s fast. So we got to learn how to control which side of the bag you land on.”

There are different play styles in cornhole, such as using blockers. Blockers are bags thrown in front of the hole in order to prevent another player’s bags from entering.

“It’s actually a lot more like chess than you think, because there’s so much strategy involved. There’s so much different stuff you can do. But it really depends on your play style and what you play best at,” Barger said.

Club member Luke Hearn, a sophomore vocal education major from Salem, Arkansas, said the club is a way for him to destress and connect with the cornhole community.

“In school, you have a lot of stress, a lot of classes. So it’s just having something to do that doesn’t put a lot of stress on you, just having something to do just for fun,” Hearn said. “The cornhole community, it’s such a big community that’s not really talked about. It’s just good to go out and have fun with your friends and not have to worry about a whole lot.”

At the moment, the club is focusing on getting new members and promoting itself. In the future, however, both Barger and Mitchell said they would like to start taking the club to tournaments. The club has been using the Daily Digest and word of mouth to let students know about it.

“We’re grassrooting and starting out so a lot of people see cornhole as a bar game, which it probably is, but it’s more of the social aspect. What we’re trying to do right now is get people of like-mind and give you a chance to network, because you never know when you might meet somebody,” Mathis said. 

Meetings are on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. in the archery room of the Health, Physical Education and Sports Sciences Building.

Categories: Life