Many think that cornhole is a fun, leisurely game for a warm summer day, but what you may not know is the intense matchups that happen every Wednesday night in the Northland.

Twin Ports Cornhole has seen a rapid increase in participation, despite the league’s newer creation.

“It started off as an idea, and then it turned into, we’ve ran now like 145 different events since November of 2022,” said Josh Johnson, the owner of Twin Ports Cornhole.

The league is for all experience levels; beginners, amateurs, and even those that are becoming close to professionals.

The Wednesday night meetups aren’t just for experience and smiles though, there are some real stakes on the line.

“The way I run ours is you pay an entry fee of $10 and all that money goes back out to people, so say we get 10 people to play, it’s $100, split the money up between the top three, and they get to keep the $100, whatever the split is, $70, $20, $10 or whatever it ends up being,” said Johnson.

Outside of the Twin Ports, cornhole is one of the fastest growing sports in the country, right behind pickleball.

The growth that Twin Ports Cornhole has seen has been encouraging.

“It’s been growing quite a bit, when we first started we had like 23 people show up to our first tournament, and I was like ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool’, I thought it was just going to be me and my buddies and maybe a couple of friends, and we put the word out and next thing you know there’s 20 people and then the next one we had, there was 30 people, and so it was pretty crazy,” added Johnson.

Now, with the sport moving inside for the winter, it may just continue on it’s trend.

“If we did want to grow we’d have to go to another night in the week, or find a bigger venue or something, but the plan is to keep growing, keep new people coming in,” shared Johnson. “I compare it a lot to bowling, you start off, you’re not that good, but after awhile you’re buying $100 balls, just like here you’re buying a $100 set of bags, because obviously the bags make you better, it’s not practice obviously.”

Twin Ports Cornhole operates weekly, with some events sprinkled in on weekends.