It was a lighthearted story that seemed as consequential as a lawn game.
Last week Winthrop University announced that it was giving two high-school seniors what are probably the first athletic scholarships to play cornhole in college. The novel news made headlines at NPR, The Washington Post, and CBS News.
The students, whose scholarships will reportedly cover about half their tuition, will be enrolling at Winthrop at a time when cornhole, a game that involves tossing bean bags into a hole, often at bars or summer parties, is becoming more high-profile and competitive. Big tournaments are aired on ESPN.
Winthrop’s foray into cornhole is part of colleges’ efforts to get creative about how to raise enrollment. Some see unconventional but popular sports as a way to get publicity and offer students something they might not be able to get anywhere else.
Winthrop is not just trying that enrollment tactic with cornhole. It also has a disc-golf team and was relatively early to esports. The public university also hopes to start a drone-racing team this year and, eventually, a BMX team.
“This is part of a larger strategy around enrollment management that a lot of institutions are trying to grapple with,” said Joseph Miller, the university’s vice president for enrollment management and marketing. “How do we emerge from some of the enrollment losses we experienced during the Covid years?”
Winthrop is in Rock Hill, S.C., a suburb of Charlotte, N.C. — not a region expected to see the sharp drops in high-school-age students that other areas are already experiencing. But Miller said that does not mean the college can sit back. With other public regional universities getting more creative about recruitment, Winthrop will see more competition for students. And then there was the pandemic. Miller said enrollment dropped by about 10 percent during those years, due to both fewer applicants and lower retention. (There were 3,741 students in the fall of 2022.)
But the college is rebounding, in part, thanks to efforts to recruit into nontraditional sports. In 2023 it saw a 22-percent increase in new freshmen and a 17-percent rise in transfer students, according to Miller. Some applicants, he said, are hearing about Winthrop from players with followings on social-media platforms like Discord.
The number of students coming for cornhole is still relatively small, but Chuck Rey, Winthrop’s director of athletics, said the sport is a retention tool as well. He mentioned a Winthrop soccer player who did not do particularly well on that team, but who picked up cornhole. He was good at it, and Rey said it provided him with a way to stay competitive and engaged with the college.
“It’s meeting these boys in the middle, and girls,” Rey said. “We’re teaching life lessons here.”
Cornhole Championships
Winthrop already has an advantage when it comes to nontraditional sports. Rock Hill styles itself as an amateur-sports capital. The American Cornhole League, which hosts the American Cornhole Championships, is there; Winthrop’s team will use its facilities. The United States Disc Golf Championship has taken place at Winthrop for 25 years. The BMX Racing World Championships will be held in Rock Hill this spring.
The local organizations that support those sports are also helping fund the Winthrop scholarships, Rey said. The state helped finance the esports program, which now has about 100 students.
Esports has for years been a recruitment tool for colleges, especially some that don’t have big football and basketball programs to garner national name recognition.
“You’ll find more regional colleges leaning into it,” said Jason Chung, an esports-business professor at New York University. “It’s a competitive environment. For a long while it was viewed as a hedge against enrollment declines.”
Though there’s a perception that gamers have vast followings online, that’s the exception rather than the rule, Chung said. Still, some colleges have attracted students by winning competitions.
For Rey, the future holds not just enrollment challenges but big changes in how college sports are run. He sees the major conferences gaining power and being able to set more of the rules. “We want to make sure we’re still included,” Rey said of smaller, regional institutions. “We want to still compete, but not be a big detriment to our universities.”
Jaxson Remmick and Gavin Hamann, the two incoming Winthrop students, are some of the best cornhole players in the country, according to their soon-to-be coach, Dusty Thompson. They started playing cornhole with their parents and now compete together as a team.
Since the news of Remmick’s and Hamann’s scholarships last week, Thompson said other prospective applicants had reached out.
“It’s made my recruiting job easier,” he said.
