Trey Ryder steps back from ACL operations, takes advisory role

Trey Ryder was no longer handling the American Cornhole League’s day-to-day strategy, but the move was hardly a clean exit. The ACL said Ryder stepped down as chief strategy officer and shifted into an advisory role on the league’s board structure, where he became head of the Advisory Committee while taking on a new professional role outside the company.

That mattered because Ryder had been one of the league’s most visible builders, not just an executive on paper. He joined the ACL in 2017 as a part-time broadcast analyst and moved up through social media coordinator and media director jobs before becoming CMO and later CSO. He also hosted Around the ACL, which made him a familiar voice for fans and a useful bridge between the league’s business side and its growing broadcast presence.

The practical change is simple, but important: Ryder moved out of the operational lane and into a seat that is more about guidance than execution. As head of the Advisory Committee, he can still shape direction, but the weekly grind of running the league shifts to other hands. In a sport where presentation matters as much as rankings, that kind of transition can change how fast decisions get made and who owns them.

The timing also fit a bigger ACL pattern. The league said its broadcasts reach millions of fans across ESPN, YouTube, TikTok and more, and it launched Mic Check: The Search for the Next Great Cornhole Commentator to keep building its on-air talent pipeline. Ryder’s background in commentary, media and sponsor development has been tied to the ACL’s push toward a more polished, mainstream sports product, so keeping him in an advisory role suggested the league still valued his voice while trying to widen the circle of daily operators.

That broader shift has been underway since commissioner Stacey Moore founded the ACL in 2015 with a goal of building cornhole into “the next great professional sport in the country.” The league now says it runs more than 30,000 tournaments a year, and its 2025/2026 Pro Guide points to an expanded roster of top-tier players. ACL’s multi-year travel partnership with Engine, which runs through 2028, showed the same pattern: more structure, more scale, more moving parts.

Ryder’s exit from the operational seat and move into the boardroom read like part of that same expansion phase. The ACL kept a longtime strategist close, but it also made clear that the league is evolving from a tightly run startup style operation into something with a more formalized governance model and a bigger commercial ambition.