Gather Your Squad and Throw Down with Squadholio

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Cornhole and other bar sports are almost always played between two individuals or 2-person teams, but Scoreholio now gives tournament directors and league administrators the ability to combine people and teams into “squads” that take each other on in a battle for supremacy. It’s a fun format that can turn individually-oriented games into collective competitions that generate great camaraderie and community, and we’re calling it “Squadholio.”

I’ll explain where the idea came from, tell you what it’s like to play in a Squadholio tournament, float some things you can use the format for, and wrap up with a quick tutorial on how to run one.

Origin of the Idea

The idea of competition between crews isn’t new of course, but a few years ago Bobby Tovar of Dawg Pound League out of Fresno, California started organizing a specific system that’s become quite popular in California where we’re based: two clubs form ten teams each, and they’d play all ten of the other club’s teams. After a few such events went down, his friend Ron Stokes of West Coast Cornhole created a spreadsheet that made it easier for organizers to manage the mayhem of a full mesh round robin of a hundred games between a total of 20 teams. The spreadsheet made it easier to run such events, and did a great job of displaying the results, but organizers still had to very actively manage the complicated events by coordinating rounds, entering scores, etc. And the only way far-off friends could follow along was if somebody Facebooked pictures of the dashboard.

Many who’ve played in crew battles like those they popularized here in California have said it’s the most fun they’ve had playing cornhole, and since we’re all about “making cornhole more fun for everyone” we figured maybe we could help! First things first, let’s look at what it’s like to play in a Squadholio tournament.

Tutorail Video

Playing in a Squadholio Tournament

Squadholio is a round robin tournament in which the players or teams of one “squad” play those of another squad. There’s no need for a playoff — whichever squad wins more games takes the title, and the bragging rights! The only difference is that the dashboard displays the leaderboard as two squads, shows how many games each has won, and how many points they’ve scored.

A Few Fun Ways to Use Squadholio

  • Club vs. Club Battles: One cornhole club throws down a gauntlet, another accepts, and it’s GAME ON!!! Each club selects a number of players they’ve agreed upon, up to say 20 people or 10 teams. They meet up at an  appointed time and see who can win more games!
  • Intramural “Captains” Competition: In January DPL Bobby named two of his best players, pros Kevin Rojas and Louie Vallejo, captains that got to pick their teams. You can either have them draft their teams like we used to do on the playground, or behind closed doors to save guys like me the pain of being picked last. : (
  • Charity or Corporate: Unlike most cornhole tournaments, Squadholio generates amazing camaraderie and team spirit as people cheer for their squadmates, and cranks out some of the best bragging rights you can imagine. Sales vs. engineering, students vs teachers, police officers vs. firefighters.
  • League Play Among Squads: Speaking of bragging rights, what if you had every department in your company, or every grade level of a high school, or every high school of a school district, form a squad? You could have them each play all of the other squads! Freshmen play the Sophomores one week, then the Juniors the week after that, then the Seniors. You’d end up with records and win/point totals that would let you seed a playoff among the squads, or maybe run an tournament all star tournament featuring the best players or teams from each school.

How to Run a Squadholio Tournament

To set up a Squadholio tournament, you’ll select game format Round Robin and team generation Squadholio. While it’s in beta you can only initially create Squadholio tournaments in the web app, not the Apple or Android mobile apps.

  • # of Courts: Number of courts doesn’t matter like it does for Switcholio. If you have two 10-team squads playing each other you can run 10 courts and there just won’t be any breaks, or you can run fewer courts so people have some downtime between games.
  • # of Rounds: Squadholio was originally conceived to full round robin where each team plays every one of the other squad’s team, and in such situations you set the # of Rounds to the number of teams. You can, however set the round robin to fewer games.  You might want/need to do that if you’re short on time, or maybe you have two squads so big you’d never want to run that many games. Two squads of 15 playing full round robin would be 15 x 15  for 225, but if each team played just 4 games, you’d be looking at a viable 60 game event. Note that running abbreviating a round robin like that introduces the possibility that two teams that have already played each other are the only teams with games left to play, so the system has no choice but to match them up.

Checking People In

When you scan somebody to check them in to your tournament, you can assign them to a team if you’ve set teams up. If you don’t assign them to a team they’ll go into “unassigned” so you can assign them to a team later, from the admin interface. In either case, the assignment of teams to squads, whether done ahead of time or after the fact, is done in the admin interface.

Managing Players, Teams and Squads

The Setup -> Players tab, where you normally manage players and which teams they are on, will then let you manage not just players and teams, but the squads each team is part of, like this:

More Things to Know

  • Size of Teams: You can have 1, 2 or up to 4 people on each team, so you can run a Squadholio tournament as singles, doubles or crew cup.
  • Must be Same # of Teams: The two squads need to have the same number of teams. You can get creative though, if one squad is short a team you can always break their last team into two one-person teams.
  • SPR: Yes, each player’s Soreholio Player Rating is affected by games played as part of a Squadholio tournament.
  • Setting Squad Colors: See the little colored pencils next to the sample squad names? Click those to edit each squad’s name or designated color.

Conclusion

So that’s Squadholio! I hope you agree that this exciting new format gives tournament directors and league administrators a powerful new way to build camaraderie and community!