Lehigh Lanes has been serving the Florida community of Lehigh Acres, part of the Cape Coral-Fort Myers metropolitan area, for more than 60 years. It recently underwent a massive renovation that included the installation new carpeting and furnishings, as well as QubicaAMF EDGE String Pinspotters.
The larger story: The center will be hosting a PBA50 Regional tournament this weekend (May 16-18), meaning Lehigh Lanes will go down in history as the first center ever to host a PBA tournament on string machines.
The rest of the story: It won’t be a title event, even though several prominent players believe it should be simply because everyone is playing in the same environment.
According to PBA Commissioner Tom Clark, it’s a matter of the PBA “needing to perform due diligence before awarding official PBA titles or points.”
Clark said the PBA50 Regional will be one of a number of Regional events that “will serve as great trial runs and enable all parties, including the players, to provide feedback.”
The due diligence also will include independent study by PBA Director of Rules and Equipment Neil Stremmel on the differences between string and free fall machines. That effort will continue through 2024, which is why no title will be awarded in the first PBA50 event to be conducted in a center equipped with string machines.
Even so, the tournament hosts are pumped up about the tournament.
“We’re excited to be hosting a PBA50 Regional,” says Chris Keane, one of the center’s partners. “These guys want to compete, and they have no problem doing so with the string [pinspotters].”
Adds Keane: “Like most bowlers, we were skeptical of these string pins at the start. But after bowling on them [at a nearby center] in January, all our doubts were quickly erased.”
Keane and his business partner, Dennis Bush, are competitive bowlers themselves, Keane in PBA50 events and Bush in USBC and TAT action. Bush had owned the business with another partner, but when their lease ran out, that partner exited and Keane, who had managed a car dealership and owned a car wash in New York, invested.
Keane has had a few near misses with the PBA50 winner’s circle, but perhaps more importantly, is a two-time Dick Weber Sportsmanship Award winner.
Lehigh Lanes hosts leagues five evenings a week along with a weekday morning senior league and a wall-to-wall youth program on Saturday mornings. The center also stages a four-game handicap sweeper every Saturday and a six-game scratch tournament with a stepladder final round once per month. And it hosted a PBA50 Regional in 2022, selling it out with 72 players on three squads.
Keane says the local bowlers love the center and are grateful that an investment is being made to keep it going and keep their competitive juices flowing.
String pinsetting machines that meet United States Bowling Congress specifications were approved for use in certified competition by the USBC last April. Will the PBA be next to grant its seal of approval by awarding titles at string-pin centers? The 2024 PBA50 tournament at Lehigh Lanes could go a long way toward answering that question.
“Once we are satisfied with our testing and trials, hopefully we can begin 2025 with approved string systems by PBA counting for titles, points, et cetera,” Clark told BCM. “We hope the PBA’s assumed eventual stamp of approval, which we take very seriously, will mean a lot towards the future of strings.”
Bowling Center Management Online 
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