Bowling could become Olympic sport
Las Vegas believes in bowling. Vegas-based Station Casinos has bowling centers at its Texas Station, Sunset Station, Santa Fe Station and Wildfire resorts. Boyd Gaming offers bowling at the Suncoast, the Gold Coast, the Orleans and Sam’s Town. And South Point Hotel Casino on the Strip recently opened a $35 million 64-lane, tournament-caliber bowling center.
Mike Kaufman, Boyd’s bowling operations director for the Nevada region, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that play at Boyd Gaming lanes has increased 4 percent in the last 18 months.
“We always market for league bowlers,” Boyd Gaming spokesman David Strow said. “Based on our history with locals, we’ve always marketed toward them by giving them value to come to our properties. What we offer to the league bowler, with pricing and amenities, is far more than what is able to be offered in other markets in the United States.”
“There is a huge push to get Olympic bowling, which is amazing for us as we just opened the best tournament facility in the world, and now it’s all of a sudden going to be an Olympic sport,” South Point General Manager Ryan Growney said. “To do that, they said they’d have to make some adjustments and one of the things they want to try to get moving forward is changing the scoring system.”
South Point’s 90,000-square-foot bowling plaza, which will host the U.S. Bowling Congress Open Championships, is expected to help fill more than 2,100 hotel rooms at the resort. The 2009 championship, held at Cashman Center, ran for more than five months and hosted 17,200 teams, the Review-Journal reported, for a nongaming economic impact of more than $120 million.
