Helping Santa Clarita Heal Through Cornhole

When Nick and I founded Scoreholio, one of our biggest goals was to help the community. Among the many things I’m proud of, and they are many, it’s that we’ve achieved that goal.

Supporting Santa Clarita in the Wake of the Saugus High Shooting

Last week my home town of Santa Clarita experienced a school shooting that took two young lives, seriously injured three more, and deeply affected every one of us who live here and love this town. I now know first-hand the trauma of needing to get your family together, safe, while begrudgingly respecting the need to lock schools down, shelter in place and let law enforcement do their job, and I wouldn’t wish that experience and helpless feeling on anybody.

I also, through cornhole, now know the gratifying feeling of helping the community you love come together to heal and support the victims of something like this. I had been scheduled to run a fundraiser for the Saugus High School (where the shooting took place) baseball team yesterday, at Wolf Creek Brewery. When the shooting occured I talked to the organizers about possibly cancelling because of the shooting, and they brought a tear to my eye by telling me they wanted to keep it on the books, but have the funds raised go to the victims of the shooting. I loved the idea, and promoted the change. What happened next blew me away…

I was flooded with emails and phone calls from people who wanted to not only participate, but donate products and services for prizes, and a raffle, and just to help out. I’ll admit I got nervous about how big it was getting, but elated and up for the challenge. With the help of Chris Pleugs and Amy Lee who run SCV Cornhole, we charged ahead and made it HAPPEN and raised almost $8,000 that’s going directly to the victims. I’d also like to thank Laina Mcferren and the amazing staff of our host Wolf Creek, Tyler Lasdon and family for DJ services, Sweet Beams ice cream and Monica’s Taco’s who reached out to come and donate proceeds, and United Services for bringing the porta-potties we needed to accomodate the crowd.

Inventing Another New Format

Last year when we invented the Switcholio tournament format that gives everybody a new partner for each game of a round robin, our goal was to make the game more welcoming to new players by fostering more fair competition among players of all skill levels.

This tournament was scheduled for noon, and needed to be done by 5:00 so people could get to a vigil for victims that evening. Interest was off the chart, and we had to limit participation to 100 teams of two people. Even on 16 courts it was going to be tight, and that inspired another new format: Round Robin Knockout.  It’s a a 4-game round robin, but you’re “out” with your second loss. Simply had to do that to speed things up, but it worked really well. Those there to support the event got to play two games, serious players got to play increasingly difficult games and after the round robin I seeded everybody who hadn’t lost two, i.e. 4-0 and 3-1 into a seeded single elimination playoff bracket. We have added support for Round Robin Knockout to the app.

Everybody had a great time, we saw some GREAT cornhole down the stretch and I couldn’t be more proud of how it went.

Scoreholio is the only way we could have pulled off such a tournament, and for that I am thankful for my best friend Nick the code-wizard who has built something truly amazing, along with Greg Barr and Jeff Chimienti who have helped us improve the app and make it the most widely used tournament software in the cornhole world. promise to continue helping this cornhole world for what it is: amazing.

Scoreholio Supports Your Efforts to do Good

As part of this pride, I wanted to formally announce something we’ve been doing on the down-low: giving organizers of fundraisers access to “Pro” level features for free so they can more easily run the best, biggest cornhole tournaments possible. This includes the live support option, to help organizers who aren’t experienced with running cornhole tournaments figure out how to best set things up and keep them running smoothly.

We will turn Pro level membership on so you can set up and test your tournament, run your amazing event, then return you to whatever plan you were on previously.

To take advantage of this offer, we just need you to email us a link to the event’s facebook page, along with the organizer’s email address. All we ask is that you add our logo to your flyer and mention Scoreholio in social media posts about the tournament. Sound fair?