Northland Bowl & Sports Center — Local services in Ferguson Township

Northland Bowling at State College. Some friends and I spent a Saturday night here after a previous visit a few weeks before.

This visit showed us how Northland operates. You pay for an lane, show up, get your shoes and bowl away. Simple enough. The alley has food options which are your typical fried enjoyments. Getting a menu however proved to be more difficult task than throwing 3 consecutive strikes. The staff promised someone would come to our lane several times and yet no one came. Our group tried to order at the counter, but the attendant who was taking orders from the group ahead of us pointed us to a sign stating that orders would be taken at your lane by a waiter and not at the counter. Great.

We made it through all of our games without seeing a single server come our way. That's fine as we were there to bowl, not eat. This review would have more stars if the bowling went well... We found pretty soon that pins would get knocked over at after each turn was made and it wasn't just our lane. I witnessed many other lanes had this problem of pins being improperly set and tipped over even before a ball was thrown.

The real banger that had us moments from turning in our bowling shoes early was the occasional freeze up of the laning system. On three occasions, our lane wouldn't complete the pin reset. It froze after the pins were lowered, yet the mechanism wouldn't rise after, leaving us stuck to wait on staff for assistance. The first two times it fixed itself after waiting long enough. The third time, we were stuck for about 35 minutes. The staff told us it would fix itself and boy were they right almost half an hour later. If you haven't tried it, spending your Saturday night waiting for a lane to fix itself is a great way to pull your hair out.

It was fun bowling with friends during our two visits, but I'm certain we won't...

Honestly a very mediocre experience. Very long wait, over an hour with no real queue. When we got to our lane, we order an extremely overpriced pitcher of beer, with no indication of the price (kinda on me but they didn't give us a menu or pricing just listed the beers available). However, when we were bowling one of the attendees took the remaining half of our pitchers and turned them in to be cleaned. When questioned, he denied having taken the beer. I informed the bartender of our predicament, and she handed me the two half empty pitchers that the attendee had just brought over. Now, they were absolutely slammed and I don't blame the workers for what happened, but why lie? and when you realize the mistake that took place, why not give us fresh pitchers for the trouble? They just could have been a little more gracious about the whole situation, seeing as the pitchers were priced at roughly 3x what they should cost the consumer. Lastly, we were a large party of 8 or 9 people. When we went to check out, they said that not everyone had paid, even though we all had receipts. It took me arguing with the manager for 5 minutes before they let us leave. These guys are the only bowling option within 23 minutes of state college, and they charge and treat their customers...

I’m a regular and loved coming for the daily deals but recently they denied me the daily deal of “Throwback Thursdays”. When paying, I asked to see my receipt before paying because it was more expensive than usual and I was awkwardly told I would get the receipt after. I said okay and paid before checking for this error and then was told they wouldn’t uphold their daily deal. When asking why I didn’t get the discount they told me I didn’t clarify we were here for the deal and I must pay what was set for our lane even though it was busy and we never were told we needed to clarify.

This was almost $20 more than we planned to spend tonight.They refused to do anything about it and said “it’s over and done with”. This would be like going to a bar during happy hour and being charged full price because we didn’t clarify the time we bought the drinks…

Overall, EXTREMELY AWFUL service for absolutely everything and extremely disappointing time. I spent 30 minutes of my time “bowling” waiting for drinks and was forgotten about. I spent half of my time complaining our lane was broken and waiting for drinks, which is not worth the full price at all! Why advertise great deals but not uphold them, especially to those who come all the...