Sparta Lanes — Local services in Sparta Township

Wish we had a better time here today. We started out at lane 27 & after bowling a few frames, the score screen stopped recognizing our throws. We had to manually enter every score. After a few frames of this, we let an employee know. He was attentive & watched, & resolved it by sending us to another lane.

We moved all our stuff over to lane 20, & this is where things really took a turn for the worse. We began our second game & after throwing our balls down the lane, they simply wouldn’t come back. They would get stuck behind the pins, & keep spinning & spinning never to return. The only thing we could do was keep throwing balls back there & hope they would push the balls back onto the track so they would come back. We told the employees literally 3 separate times & all they said was they would let someone know. There was a young guy & girl working. When we tried telling the girl & getting her attention she literally looked at us, made eye contact, & kept walking away from us. We got so frustrated waiting for our balls to come back for literally 10-15 minutes we considered just getting up & leaving because not one time did one of the employees come to at least see what we were talking about when we told them our balls were not returning, at least like they did when we had our problem at the original lane. I would understand if they couldn’t because they were busy dealing with other customers, but we could see them from our lane looking at their phones a few times. Eventually we noticed the people in the lane next to ours started to have the same issue with their balls not returning either, so clearly they have equipment issues. This was pretty surprising considering the whole place has been revamped & looks new compared to how it used to look a couple of years ago, which is why we went in with higher expectations. However, that’s not to say expecting functioning equipment should be considered high expectations; that should be pretty much the bare minimum.

When we went to go pay when our game finally finished, the guy at the counter took off the price of 2 of our shoe rentals ($9) for the issues we encountered. We appreciated this & thought it was a fair discount so we left satisfied with that. Hopefully these equipment issues are resolved soon, since looking at some recent reviews on here I see other people mentioning...

It's okay. It could've been better, but I guess it could have been worse, too. I was there for a birthday party where I witnessed the staff give attitude to the parents & "lose" (to later find) the birthday cake. They also double booked, so there was a much larger & louder party going on right next to us. If you're going to over book, at least put them on the other side of the building. My son wanted to play arcade games, but the register at the front desk couldn't even break a $5 bill into singles. The games we did play weren't worth the money prize wise, unfortunately. NO CHANGING TABLE IN THE RESTROOMS!!!!! they have an entire locker room connected to the restrooms, but no changing table. And the counters are visibly grimy in there. The shoes looked old & worn but were okay. Actual bowling was okay, except the lane got jammed up a few times. The balls were clean & they had an excellent selection of sizes and weights. Screens and scoreboards were interactive and fun for the kids. Lasers were cool & provided good lighting. My final thought is that it's an older & basic bowling alley. It is probably a good time for a little trip with a small group of friends, but I definitely would not host...

If it wasn't called "Sparta Lanes" you would never know this was in Sparta. Everything was broken, shabby, dingy, gross and no one cared. There was a flood in the bathroom, when I asked if they had a mop, the response was "it's flooded in both bathrooms". That's not what I asked, there is a flood, do more than put up a sign. My bowling shoes got wet, when I went to bowl, I fell hard, hurt my knees and wrists, not to mention (as seen in the pics I provided) the sole of the rental shoe was falling completely off of the shoe. The place is a mess. Staff could not care, especially the "bartender", she couldn't be bothered to actually open our 2 beers... We had to open them, which is just lazy. For the $$ they charge for bowling it should at least be clean. The lanes where you line up to bowl were filthy and we couldn't find staff to clean...