Every Division I college has their standard line up of sports but Winthrop University has shaken up this tradition.
By Omar Woods
Sports Editor
Sports
Traditionally, every college has a similar line-up of the sports they may offer. These sports are commonly ones that have professional league counterparts such as basketball, football, and baseball.
In the past few years here at Winthrop, the university has taken a huge alternative path to this tradition with the addition of new and unconventional sports that have completely shaken up the tradition line up of a sports a school may have.
Winthrop’s cornhole team just recently had its inaugural year in Fall of 2024. In their short time of being established at Winthrop, they made waves nationally. Head Coach for the cornhole team, Dusty Thompson, mentioned just how viral their program went.
“When we broke the news to the media, it went viral. We were pretty much on every news channel in the country,” Coach Thompson said. “We made it to The New York Post, and on Good Morning America. We got mentioned on Jimmy Fallon and it just helped Winthrop in general with just getting the name out there even more than it already was.”
The cornhole team at Winthrop made further waves in the sports world by winning multiple championships at the American Cornhole League National Competition that was hosted in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on January 2nd.
The esports team at Winthrop was only just created in 2019 but has also not been slow in making its impact on Winthrop’s sports landscape. This is shown in the amount of players in the esports program reaching a staggering 100. The rise of esports has been a growing trend since the mid-2010’s and the addition of an esports team here at Winthrop only adds to its come up.
The team that plays Valorant, a tactical first-person shooter, recently traveled all the way to São Paulo, Brazil to compete in the VCT Ascension tournament which was hosted from October 17th to the 26th. In this competition, Winthrop University’s Valorant team would find themselves tied for 3rd out of 8 teams that competed.
With the new additions of esports and cornhole, the potential for more of these oddball sports to join Winthrop’s sports line-up is growing. The athletic director of Winthrop, Chuck Rey, discussed some oddball sports that the school was interested in.
“We have looked a little bit in the past into opportunities for drone racing or there is also what they call drone soccer,” Rey said. “We host the BMX World Championships twice here in Rock Hill. Some type of BMX/Cycling team, that would be exciting because we have those opportunities here.”
