Weekly drop in blind draw cornhole tournaments are tons of fun and a great way to welcome new players to the game, but there are also advantages to running a multi-week set teams league:

They’re a great way to encourage club bonding and help everybody improve their game.
Having players compete as set teams helps them learn how to work together, which is important when they step up to “real” tournaments.
Periodically recognizing a league champion offers up the fun of bragging rights and friendly rivalries within your group.

Running a cornhole league is “easy peasy” thanks to using Scoreholio’s exportable game log and ability to import teams. These tools give you the flexibility to do whatever works for your club and venue. I made this video about import/export for leagues a while ago, and will explain how to do it below. First here’s a summary of how I do it.

My venue has room for 8 courts. I think a ratio of 4 teams to a court is good for pace of play, so I allow up to 32 teams in my league. I allow 2-4 players on a team, letting them decide how to allocate their “playing time.” I run my league in 5-week sessions, with four weeks of “regular season” plus a playoff week. My goal is to get everybody 6 games a night, and for each session to take a little over two hours.

Week 1: I run one big round robin, with each team playing 6 of the other teams.
Week 2: I use the results of that first round robin to split teams evenly into an upper pool and a lower pool.
Week 3: I “promote” the top half of week 2’s lower pool up into the upper pool, and “relegate” the bottom half of week 2’s upper pool into the lower pool.
Week 4: I repeat the promotion/relegation. Top 4 lowers move up, bottom 4 uppers move down.
Week 5: For playoffs I create two brand new upper and lower brackets based on overall records. All teams play round robin against 4 of the 16 teams in their bracket, and the top 8 teams in each bracket advance to a single elimination playoff bracket.

This is a pretty complicated system. You can obviously keep things way simpler than this, and you can run any number of teams, weeks, or games per week. You can break things into different numbers of pools in some other way, or run your last week as a bracketed playoff. With that said, now I’ll walk you through how you’d run my system as an example.

How to Run My League

First Week

Create tournament with format Round Robin, team generation Set Teams, # of rounds 6.
As you register teams in the days or weeks leading up to your league, go into the Players tab and add those teams to the tournament.
When players show up for the first week, scan their Scoreholio app to check them in and then drag their name onto a team to assign them to that team. Note that you’ll only need to check people in and put them ont a team once for the entire league, which is kinda wonderful.
Click Start Tournament, then Advance Game, then grab a tasty cold beverage because you’re done for the night.

Second Week

For week two you’ll create two tournaments, with names that include “upper” and “lower” or whatever. Format will again be Round Robin, 6 rounds, but for team generation select “Import” instead of Set Teams.
First go into the upper pool tournament’s Player tab and click the “Import” button. Pick the tournament you want to import teams from in the dropdown menu, then set Import Win/Loss Record to Yes, Game Log to Yes (assuming you want to make sure people don’t play teams they played in week one) and set Times Played to No. With that done, highlight the top half of teams and click “Import Selected Teams.”
When it’s go time, click “Start Tournament” in the Players tab then Advance Games in the Round Robin tab.
Repeat those steps for the lower pool tournament you created (importing the bottom half of teams based on their week 1 records) and you’re ready for week two!

Third Week

Just like last week, create two new tournaments – one for each pool upper and lower – with those same settings. Round Robin, Import, 6 rounds.
You know how to import teams, it’ll just be a little different this time. You’ll still set win/loss record to yes, times played to no. But this time say No to import Game Log. This is because Scoreholio uses the game log to see what teams have already played each other, and keep them from playing each other again. If you keep importing the log you’ll reduce available opponents and eventually there won’t be anybody they haven’t played which will cause them to get stuck in the coming up section.
Now for the new upper pool, import the top half of week 2’s upper pool, and the top half of week 2’s lower pool. Those are the teams being promoted into this week’s upper pool. For the new lower pool, import the bottom half of both week 2 pools, as the bottom half of upper pool is being relegated to lower pool.
You’re ready for week 3. Click Start Tournament and Advance Games when you’re ready to rock.

Fourth Week

Do the same thing you did last week: import the top half of each week 3 pool into your week 4 upper pool, and the bottom half of each week 3 pool into your week 4 lower pool.
Start Tournament, Advance Games, go.

Fifth Week – Playoffs!

Do the same thing you did last week: import the top half of each week 4 pool into your week 5 upper pool, and the bottom half of each week 4 pool into your week 5 lower pool. These are your playoff pools. These are 4-game round robins because I want to leave time for an 8-team single elimination playoff.
When each of those round robins wrap up, i.e. every team has played their four games, I create a single elimination playoff bracket within that tournament, pulling through the top 8 teams of each pool.

Conclusion

I hope this helps you understand how to run a league with Scoreholio by exporting game logs and importing teams. If you haven’t watched the video I mentioned up top, I suggest you do so now to see these techniques in action. Keep in mind this is a pretty complicated example with the promotion/relegation, you can use these tools to run a much simpler more conventional league too, such as a single pool with no promotion or relegation. Whatever you decide to do, we hope you’ll let us know how it works in the Scoreholio Event Organizers Facebook group.