Bowling Mecca turns heads

When the king of pins lives in Southwest Florida, you know any new bowling center he builds will be a palace for the game.

Patrick Ciniello, a Naples resident and chairman of bowling-equipment giant QubicaAMF, plans to open an $8 million entertainment center near Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers early next month.

Called HeadPinz, the center will be a showcase for QubicaAMF. It'll have some of the latest gee-whiz technology such as synthetic lanes that can change colors and an electronic scoring system that lets players post their scores on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to 24 lanes of bowling, HeadPinz will include an aerial ropes course, a game zone with 50 different games, a laser tag arena and a restaurant called Nemo's Sports Cafe. HeadPinz hired 132 people to operate the 48,000-square-foot facility. For a sense of scale, that's nearly the size of a football field.

Because it'll be a showcase for QubicaAMF, Ciniello expects customers to fly in from around the world to visit the facility and see how the new technology functions. That's one of the reasons it's located on Treeline Avenue, near Southwest Florida International Airport.