How does the Sweet 16 tournament work at Worlds of Fun amusement park?
The Sweet 16 is a four-week elimination competition that pits all 32 games at Worlds of Fun against each other in pairs to determine which game earns the most money over the summer. Games are divided into four teams — Games 1, 2, 3, and 4 — that compete throughout the season in what amounts to a three-month color war. Each week, the lowest-performing games are cut from the bracket, and Cole Lindberg announces the results at morning shift meetings.
The tournament is more than a performance metric — it is a motivational engine built around the competitive instincts of Lindberg's mostly teenage and twentysomething workforce. By framing revenue data as a bracket competition, Lindberg gives his staff something concrete to rally around. The stakes become visible in real time: during round two of the Sweet 16, Games 3 gave away approximately 500 prizes in a single day, with their prize pyramids already reduced to roughly half their original size by 10:30 PM — a vivid sign that a team was fighting hard for its spot in the next round.
You can hear Lindberg walk through the mechanics and the atmosphere of the tournament firsthand in the episode — listen to it on Listenly.
"This opportunity is probably only going to come along once in a lifetime."
— Cole Lindberg, Games Department Manager, Worlds of Fun
About Cole Lindberg
Cole Lindberg's relationship with Worlds of Fun, the Cedar Fair-operated amusement park in Kansas City, Missouri, began long before he ever drew a paycheck there. His family held season passes, and he traveled specifically to try new roller coasters, spending years daydreaming about a career designing parks. When his father drove him to a job interview at age 14, Lindberg wore a suit — an early signal of how seriously he took the opportunity.
What started as a summer job never ended. Eleven years later, Lindberg is a full-time, year-round employee managing the park's entire games department: 32 games, a budget that demands constant margin discipline, and a seasonal staff of more than 100 young workers who need hiring, training, and sustained motivation across the punishing stretch of a summer season. He works 60 to 70 hours a week throughout the summer to keep the operation running.
The role came at a real cost. In his senior year at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, Lindberg dropped out to accept the games manager position, describing the decision plainly: it was "probably only going to come along once in a lifetime." The bet has paid off by the measure of the industry — his immediate supervisor Matt rates him among the best games managers across all 11 amusement parks operated by Cedar Fair. His authority on the economics and culture of amusement park games management is grounded in more than a decade of daily, ground-level experience at the same park.
See also
Cole runs season-long competitions including the Sweet 16 tournament, the Deathmatch tournament, and a stunt called Toss the Boss, where the game that performs best earns special rewards and recognition from management.
Cole started at Worlds of Fun at age 14 as a summer job and never left, accumulating 11 years of experience before becoming a full-time year-round employee running the park's entire games department.