The magic of beanbags
The summer before they started at Harvard, high school friends Joe McCormick and Jamie Dickerson drove to Home Depot to buy plywood. “We decided to build cornhole boards,” recalled McCormick, now a sophomore and an engineering sciences concentrator. Cornhole, also known as beanbag toss, at its simplest involves two to four players throwing beanbags through holes fashioned into opposite-facing slanted boards. Using guidelines provided by the American Cornhole Association (ACA), McCormick said, “We spent a night building this board to ACA specs, and my sister sewed together bags with sand and some sort of pink beans we found at the grocery store.” The two played all summer in their hometown of Melrose, Mass., painted the boards with the Harvard seal, and brought them to campus to start their freshman year. They began researching how to start a Harvard club sport. But paperwork issues befell them freshman year, so the unused boards were put...