Atlantic City is all about games and now sports, too. All the casino games anyone would want have been offered for more than 40 years. To that has been added betting on major sports.
In the tourism industry, there is always room for more. This year, the resort is being invaded by two decidedly non-native sports, pickleball and cornhole.
Sports fans and athletes might look down on these popular recreations, but no one questions their continuing growth and ever-higher profile. They can only be good for the local economy. The American Cornhole League will hold a tournament at Showboat Atlantic City from March 18 to 20. Then in September, the Atlantic City Indoor Open Pickleball Championship will be held at the city’s Convention Center.
Each will bring substantial good publicity, always a plus for a tourism destination.
The cornhole tournament will be nationally televised, and the audience for such a competition might be larger than Jersey Shore residents would suspect.
When the American Cornhole League was founded five years ago, it held a few hundred tournaments with total prize money of $50,000. Now it holds more than 20,000 tournaments a year and prize payouts are half a million dollars.
Cornhole tournaments are shown on ESPN. In August, the ACL world championship in Rock Hill, South Carolina, was shown live in prime time on ESPN2.
The tournament at Showboat, also on ESPN, will be the second of four 2022 ACL Cornhole Mania national tournaments for professional cornholers. Players will compete for $65,000 in payouts.
Pickleball has been one of the fastest growing sports the past five years, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. From 3.4 million players in 2019, it jumped to 4.2 million the following year, the first of the pandemic. That year, CBS was to provide the first live telecast of the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships, but the event was canceled due to COVID.
The pickleball indoor championship will be sanctioned by the USA Pickleball Association and organized by Pickleball Entertainment Consultants, which has directed the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships since 2016. It is expected to attract about 6,000 players and 4,000 spectators. Prize money will be at least $50,000. The best pickleball pros can make $200,000 a year.
Pickleball already is very popular at the Jersey Shore. In recent years, many municipalities have added courts to accommodate increasing demand. Many local players may attend the championship to see the pros in action on at least 46 courts in the convention center.
Cornhole, so-called because the beanbags tossed into a hole in a board originally were filled with corn, is played just about everywhere. It should fit right into the state’s casino gambling city. DraftKings, one of the major sports betting companies, posts live gambling lines on cornhole matches.
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