Fun and games can turn promising and rewarding. Just ask Jaxson Remmick and Gavin Hamann of Highlands Ranch, Colo., teen cornhole players who snag sports scholarships to Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. -- the latest sign of this popular activity's rising stature. There's a professional league and even dreams of gaining Olympic status.

The Colorado pair, who met during a local cornhole tournament, discovered a shared passion and a skill for playing together in doubles matches. They sometimes won thousands of dollars and were American Cornhole League national champs in the student category for two straight years. That got them noticed by Winthrop, which flew them south to play a game and offer scholarships to start this fall on the university's new eight-member cornhole team. The $20,000 annual grants cover about half of the cost to attend. Winthrop's larger teams play in Division I of the NCAA’s Big South league, but cornhole isn’t a sanctioned college-level sport yet.

In cornhole (called sack toss in some places and bags in Chicago), players or teams take turns throwing fabric bean bags at a 48-inch-long inclined board 27 feet away with a six-inch hole near its top. Points are scored by landing on the board (one point) or putting a bag through the hole (three points). The nine-year-old national league hosts over 25,000 tournaments per year and has more than 100,000 players, including 250 pros whose events are shown on CBS and ESPN.

This month, the best players won up to $4,000 each during nine days of championship competition. The longshot idea of becoming an Olympic sport is promoted by USA Cornhole, a group created by the league in 2019. "Ultimately, it's going to come down to getting enough countries playing competitively to get an extremely compelling international competition at the Olympics," says league founder Stacey Moore. "But I feel like that the success we've had on television gives us an advantage of how rapidly we can do it."

Scholarship recipient says: "We were shocked that we even got this opportunity to take something we were doing for fun as like, a sport to play in college." – Gavin Hamann

Athletic director says: "The opportunity to offer scholarships is part of a larger strategy . . . leveraging the strengths of a niche and growing sports community that surrounds Winthrop University." -- Chuck Rey

Game’s origin: A 1883 patent, describing the game as an indoor version of horseshoe-tossing, displays most features of modern cornhole. At first, the hole was square.