TAKING AIM AT CORNHOLE
Pittsburgh business growing as game booms
Lightning Cornhole, a West Deerbased company that manufactures electronic cornhole boards known as Lightning Boards, is hoping to capitalize on the fast-growing tailgate game across the country that’s becoming more sophisticated.
Over the past 14 years, cornhole has grown from its roots as a backyard game into a competitive sport, now with two national governing bodies — the American Cornhole Organization and American Cornhole Association.
Steve Czwalga, the 31-year-old founder of Lightning Cornhole, was attending the University of Dayton in Ohio when the idea for a cornhole electronic scoreboard hit him.
“If you walk up to someone and ask them what the score is, either they don’t know or there’ll be a big fight,” he said. “This pretty much solves that.”
He was playing a game of cornhole, also known as corn toss, when his friends began arguing over who was winning and what the score was. Being an electrical engineering major, he decided to solve the problem by installing an electric scoreboard into the board itself.
Competitive cornhole players use a score tower to keep track of who is leading the game, which ends when one player reaches 21 points. Frank Geers, president and founder of the ACO, said most score towers have a drink holder in the top. After all, he said, “the game does have its DNA in tailgating.”
When a bag, which can be made of resin, corn, unpopped popcorn or beans, goes in the hole — known as a “cornhole” — the throwing team receives three points. If it ends up on the wooden board — the ACO calls these throws “woodies” — the throwing team scores one.
In cornhole, scoring is based on the difference between points each round. In one round, for example, if Team Red scores three points and Team Blue scores six, Team Blue receives three points for that round while Team Red scores zero.
Mr. Czwalga said most of his orders for the Lightning Board come from those playing the game recreationally.
Trent Henkaline, owner of the Cincinnati-based American Cornhole Association after purchasing the franchise in
2016, said he believes an electronic scoreboard would be most helpful in tournament play and less so in recreational. Sometimes people forget scores, he said, but it doesn’t cause issues most of the time.
“I don’t think it’s a problem,” he said. “Most people play it for fun, at a barbecue or family event.”
The ACO always looks forward to new additions to the game. Mr. Geers said it was the first organization to make a cornhole bag with resin, which helps prevent against development of mold. While at first they faced resistance, the game has mostly embraced the resin bags.
“When we first developed that product, people in the cornhole world were like, ‘No, you can’t do that. That’s not cornhole,’ ” he said.
There are two popular stories of how the game of cornhole began.
One suggests that Native Americans developed the game, filling satchels with corn and throwing them into holes dug in the ground. This, Mr. Geers said, is how many Ohioans believe the game began. The other argues that Germans created the game in the 14th century, and it repopularized in Kentucky later.
“Kentucky and Cincinnati have really battled for years over who invented cornhole,” he said.
Since founding Lightning Cornhole in 2015, Mr. Czwalga said the business receives between 15 to 20 orders a week during its “busy season” — May through September.
He said he never imagined the business receiving this many orders when he first started playing cornhole. He had never heard of the game before attending college in Ohio.
“Now you can’t go to a tailgate without seeing five or six sets every couple of cars,” he said.
The competitive side of the sport is growing.
The ACO, founded in 2005 and based in Milford, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati, has 2,000 active members across 30 states. Last November, Monroeville hosted the organization’s Mid-Atlantic Conference tournament, the winner of which received $2,500. The American Cornhole Association has 50,000 email addresses subscribed to its newsletter and 500,000 unique visitors to its website annually.
Mr. Geers said the ACO is working on creating large prizes for winners of the organization’s competitions, but it is also trying to find other ways to build interest in competitive cornholing.
“Our focus has been making this a sport, something competitive, something that can be televised,” he said.
Like the ACO, Lightning Cornhole is focused on raising awareness. Mr. Czwalga said the most difficult part of starting his own business was perfecting the manufacturing process. In March, Lightning Cornhole received a patent for its electronic board. Since then, the company has focused on building the business and marketing its product.
Lightning Cornhole is manufactured by Mr. Czwalga and his family in West Deer. Lightning Boards are available on the business’s website, lightningcornhole.com. They start at $359.99, although Lightning Cornhole also sells nonelectronic wooden boards from $104.99to $169.99.