On the afternoon of Sunday, July 28, La Porte Economic Advancement Partnership’s (LEAP) La Porte Young Professionals (LPYP) group hosted its annual cornhole tournament. The event took place at the Beach House on the shores of La Porte’s Stone Lake. LPYP is an organization that gives young professionals from a variety of fields the opportunity to network with one another. This is the third year that the cornhole tournament has been featured as a LakeFest event. LakeFest, which is in its fourth year, is a weekend-long festival that features a wide variety of fun and exciting events like live music concerts, Nerf gun battles, car shows, and Aquacross Jet Ski races.
To play in the cornhole tournament, each two-player team paid an entry fee of $30. The first, second, and third place winners each receive a percentage of the compiled fees, while the leftover funds go towards LPYP. Lindsay Kneifel, director of marketing and communications at LEAP and a member of LPYP, enjoys putting on the tournament every year.
“This event is a great way to get people out on the beach,” Kneifel said. “I believe it’s a really nice complement to LakeFest. When we were designing this tournament, we wanted to pick a beach sport that was something other than volleyball or one of the typical beach sports. Cornhole is a really big deal in La Porte and it’s already one of the events in LEAP’s La Porte Olympics, so we thought that cornhole would be a great sport to bring to LakeFest. The boards for the tournament were built and painted by students at La Porte High School, which is really special.”
A total of 27 teams participated in the tournament this year, each one determined to win out over the competition. Spectators set up their lawn chairs under the verandah of the Beach House to watch the action. The cornhole players remained cool and collected as the Aquacross competitors roared across Stone Lake on their Jet Skis behind them. Janelle Phelps, one of the cornhole players, expressed her pleasure in being able to participate in the tournament.
“This cornhole tournament brings a lot of different people together for a fun activity,” Janelle Phelps said. “It's also fun to see the Jet Ski race in the background. My husband and I are from La Porte, so this is an event that is really easy for us to get to. This is our second year playing in the tournament. We first heard about it on Facebook last year. The quality of this year’s tournament is consistent with that of the last one, which is great. I hope everyone had a lot of fun today and that they’ll want to come back and do it next year.”
After a series of nail-biting match-ups, father-son duo Charles Martin and Ethan Martin took first place in the tournament while Janelle Phelps and her husband Kevin Phelps took second place. Paden Shidler and Kobe Dickson won third place.
Kneifel considers LakeFest to be very beneficial to the La Porte community for a variety of reasons and looks forward to the event’s upcoming installments.
“If you live here, it can be easy to forget about the many natural attractions that we have,” Kneifel said. “Hopefully, this tournament and LakeFest in general will show everyone here that La Porte is a great place to live and visit. I really hope that people realize how great it is that we have natural attractions like Stone Lake and the other lakes right here in our community. I’ve been on the LakeFest committee since the very beginning. I love being a part of it and seeing how it brings the community together to celebrate La Porte. We’re already excited for next year and the LakeFest committee will be working really hard to make it even bigger and better for our fifth anniversary.”
To learn more about LEAP, please visit laportepartnership.com. You can learn more about LakeFest and its events here.