The newest tenant at Charlottesville’s Dairy Market food hall is also one of its largest, but its premise is all about keeping things small.
SunPins has brought duckpin bowling, the bite-size cousin of the more popular tenpin bowling, back to the city for the first time in decades.
The bowling alley has filled the space in the Dairy Market’s western wing left vacant after South & Central steakhouse closed its doors last September.
The inspiration behind SunPins is another sports entertainment enterprise.
"This was born out of a visit to Topgolf," SunPins founder George Ordway told The Daily Progress. "I was really interested in and impressed by the way those folks took the game of golf and really used it as a way to bring people together."
Ordway plans to model the SunPins business off of Topgolf’s successful model: Start with a classic sport, add food and drink, and become a destination.
SunPins features six bowling lanes, five dartboards, a bar and a full-service kitchen serving classic pub fare as well as flatbreads and salads.
Ordway was also inspired by a desire to bring the game of duckpin bowling out of the dark, both figuratively and literally.
"I think every town has a legacy tenpin bowling alley, but every town doesn’t have duckpin, so it’s kind of fun just to have a different offering," said Ordway.
He said he first learned of duckpin when he was living in New England. He loved the idea: smaller pins, smaller balls and three balls per set instead of two.
"I played in my years living in Boston, and I thought it was a great game, and I think it’s a little more approachable for a wider subset of people," he said. "You don’t have to rent the shoes. The balls are much lighter. You don’t have to put your fingers in them. It’s a quicker game."
But down in Virginia, where Ordway attended the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, duckpin was harder to find.
According to longtime duckpin bowler Scott Hensley, however, there was a time when it seemed every city in Virginia boasted duckpin bowling alleys. In fact, Hensley recalled a time when it was the preferred version of the game in the Old Dominion.
Duckpin first spread to Virginia in the early 20th century from its northern neighbor Maryland, where it remains popular to this day. Duckpin lanes were constructed across the commonwealth, in big cities such as Norfolk and small towns such as Mount Jackson.
Charlottesville got in on the action and had at least one duckpin alley operating as late as the 1980s, Hensley told The Daily Progress.
Duckpin’s fall began in the 1970s, when manufacturers stopped producing the machines that reset the pins, known as pinsetters. With no new machines or any way to maintain the current machines, many duckpin alleys were forced to close. Those few that remain depend on a small group of mechanics with the know-how to fix the machines, as well as spare parts from the closed-down alleys.
"All you can do is keep it patched together," said Hensley, who is Virginia’s lone member on the Maryland-based National Duckpin Bowling Congress. "The lanes that I’ve been using down here and I work on, they were made in the mid-‘50s."
He said most duckpin bowling alley operators eventually found the maintenance too much of a burden.
"It’s not a business where you’ll get rich overnight, for sure," said Hensley. "You got to be in it for the long haul."
By the 1980s, duckpin alleys were closing in Culpeper, Tappahannock, Harrisonburg and Charlottesville. As of 2022, only 30 nationally sanctioned duckpin alleys operated across the U.S. Only one of those was in Virginia: T-Bowl Lanes in Shenandoah.
Until SunPins opened on July 1, the Charlottesville area offered only one alley to bowlers: Bowlero, off U.S. 29 just north of the city.
Bowlero also combines sports and entertainment much like SunPins, but the latter has it beat on at least two fronts, according to Ordway: atmosphere and pricing.
"The places I grew up bowling for birthday parties or to get together with friends are typically dark and windowless," said Ordway. "The spin on bowling for us was really to try to bring as much light and air into the space as possible."
Ordway did this by replacing the four windows facing 10th Street in the Dairy Market space with folding glass doors which can be opened to let the outdoors in. Now, a soft breeze can flow across the hardwood lanes.
"I love the location," customer Brandon Evans told The Daily Progress. "What they did with the small location, it’s pretty awesome."
It wasn’t just Evans first trip to SunPins, it was his first time in the Dairy Market — accomplishing a mission of the Dairy Market’s property manager TLC, which previously told The Daily Progress it wanted the food hall’s newer tenants to give “people a reason to come to the Dairy Market other than just eating.”
SunPins’ six lanes may seem small compared to the 48-lane Bowlero, but time and space are managed using an online reservation system, with two lanes always open for walk-ins.
The business also undercuts Bowlero’s price, charging $10 per bowler per hour, compared to Bowlero’s rate of $10.99.
And since SunPins’ lanes are raised off the ground, players never step on the hardwood and thus don’t need to rent or buy bowling shoes, making it even more affordable.
The lack of functioning pinsetters was a challenge for SunPins, but one it overcame by embracing modern technology: the string pinsetter.
Instead of a traditional sweeper device, SunPins’ pins are connected to a machine on loose strings, and after the first roll, the string simply raises those pins which were toppled, so the player can roll again.
Some players who attended SunPins opening week weren’t necessarily thrilled with the strings-attached approach.
"I didn’t like how the pins are attached so they don’t fall on each other," Julia Hutter told The Daily Progress.
But most players seemed to be enjoying themselves, including Blake and Zoe Robertson, who visited SunPins to celebrate their three-year wedding anniversary.
"This is my first time ever trying duckpin," Zoe Robertson. "I’m adjusting a bit, but I like the idea of it."
"I feel like the idea is just to throw it real hard," her husband said.
SunPins, at 946 Grady Ave., is open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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