A NEW era of ten-pin bowling in Mount Gambier will roll into action this afternoon when Kaboom Family Entertainment opens the doors to its newly redeveloped bowling alley.
The future of the entertainment venue was thrown into limbo earlier this year when landlords seized the Gambier City Bowl building due to unpaid rent by previous owners.
However, with the success of the Treehouse Play Cafe, business partners Stewart Owen and David Walker swooped on an opportunity to purchase the family entertainment venue for $57,000 at auction in February.
What followed was two months of renovations and preparation in readiness for today’s launch of the new-look entertainment hub.
“It has been a busy and somewhat stressful couple of months, but I am excited we are finally here,” Mr Owen said.
Mr Owen said he hoped the venue would provide another community space for the region.
“With a new cafe, an arcade area with a pool table and of course the bowling, we hope this can become a place people want to keep coming back to,” Mr Owen said.
“They say bowling is an old sport, but it does not have to be seen like that, everyone loves a game of ten-pin bowling and we hope to make it fun and exciting again.”
Changes to the alley’s lanes and seating areas are yet to be made, but Mr Owen said that section of the venue will be addressed in the next stage of the redevelopment.
“With the right community support, we are hoping to have new lanes, pin machines and seating areas within 12 months,” Mr Owen said.
“The seating area needs a bit of a makeover and the pin machines are 55 years old, so we definitely need to update those to some that are a bit more reliable.
“We are hoping that around February next year we can close for around a month and start those renovations.”
Mr Owen said they have gained both new and old staff across both their entertainment venues since taking over the bowling alley earlier this year.
“It is great that we have been able to hire 11 new employees to work at both the Treehouse Play Cafe and Kaboom Family Entertainment,” he said.
“On top of that we retained two experienced employees from the previous bowling business.”
It is now “all systems go” for the new entertainment venue, despite facing a number of challenges since Mr Owen and Mr Walker took over in February.
“The fire safety issues were well-documented, but it really just ended up being a bit of confusion between Mount Gambier City Council and the owners of the building,” Mr Owen said.
“Once they sat down and talked about it, there were only two or three problems, which were able to be solved within two days.”
Kaboom Family Entertainment re-opens to the public at 3pm today.
