Connecticut

A Grassroots Effort: The American Cornhole League

It's the same game you play in the backyard or at a cookout, but the American Cornhole League is taking things to the next level.

This isn’t your typically backyard game. Over the long 4th of July holiday weekend, hundreds of amateur and professional cornhole players came to Mohegan Sun as part of one of the American Cornhole League’s national tournaments.

“ACL was founded in 2015 and we had our first championships in 2016 for about a hundred players,” American Cornhole League media director Troy Ryder said.

Now, three years later, there’s 30,000 players across the country. Some of them, from Connecticut, part of Central Connecticut Cornhole. The league was co-founded by Jason Bell and Matt Marin.

"We made scoreboard, we logo’d everything up, we just wanted to go big,” Bell said of their first night a year and a half ago. “Maybe 30 the first night and then just every week it got bigger."

Their numbers are growing side by side with the national participation.

“That's the heart of our growth,” Ryder said. “The ACL slogan is ‘anyone can play and anyone can win.’"

It may not be in the backyard, but it is a grassroots effort.

“We have every type of player, brand new people that have never even thrown a bag all the way up to guys that can get almost every bag in the hole,” Bell said. “It is for anyone, it really is."

If you’d like to learn more about Central Connecticut Cornhole, you can find them on Facebook.

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