Beaufort’s only bowling center shuts its doors. What’s next for Ribaut Road land?
The Community Bowling Center on Ribaut Road in Beaufort, run by a church that sought to bring “wholesome entertainment” to the region, has closed its doors.
“We could never recover from COVID,” the Rev. Randy Roberts told The Beaufort Gazette on Monday.
The center had been owned by Love House Ministries, a church on Parris Island Gateway, for the past eight years.
Doors closed Thursday, and the church has sold the property.
The closure of the center at Ribaut and Firehouse Lane, which also offered laser tag, leaves no other general public bowling options north of the Broad River.
Bowling centers are located at Marine Corps Recruit Depot on Parris Island in Port Royal and at the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort. Civilians can bowl at those locations but only if they have an affiliation with the base.
Station 300 is located in Bluffton, south of the Broad.
As an entertainment venue, Community Bowling Center was among the first businesses to close because of COVID-19 in March 2020, and it was one of the last to reopen in July of that year for the same reason, Roberts said.
The number of bowlers dropped drastically, Roberts said. The staff was cut from 10 to 2. He described the financial impact of the pandemic as “severe.”
To keep the doors open, Love House Ministries applied for state COVID-19 relief funds available to not-for-profits but was denied, Roberts said.
“I was kind of perplexed by that,” Roberts said.
Roberts said his application for funding was denied for failure to file a solicitation letter that not-for-profits have to file if they are planning to solicit funds. In correspondence with the state on the matter in January 2021, Roberts wrote that the group was never planning to solicit for funds and called the denial of assistance “harsh punishment” for a not-for-profit seeking funds offered by the government.
“We now must face the unfortunate decision to place our establishment up for sale because a panel with no entertainment representation decided that WE WERE EXPENDABLE,” he wrote.
The state’s correspondence with Roberts said it received 1,590 applications requesting a total $76 million with $25 million available.
Challenges faced
Love House Ministries bought the 26,000-square-foot building on 2.2 acres, home of the shuttered Ribaut Lanes, in August of 2013, almost eight years to the day that Love House Ministries closed its doors.
The goal of Love House Ministries in opening the Community Bowling Center was to provide wholesome entertainment at low prices, Roberts said, not to make a profit.
But Love House Ministries carried a heavy financial load for the center, and it was unfair to continue to support “something taking on water so rapidly,” Roberts said.
One challenge that the Bowling Center had to overcome was that people thought it was exclusively for Love House Ministries, which wasn’t the case, Roberts said. Another was that it was not open on Sundays and did not serve alcohol.
“I don’t know if the whole community felt that way,” Roberts said.
Roberts said he sometimes hears people complain that there is nothing to do north of the Broad River. His question for people who make that charge is, “When was the last time they visited the bowling alley, or another local entertainment venue?”
“I pray they support the other surviving entertainment venues,” Roberts said.
