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Strykz Bowling Alley
Written by: W.C Stevenson
Sponsored Content
On a Friday night at Strykz, Southside feels switched on. The lanes glow, the music carries, kids bounce between the arcade and the lanes, and the bar keeps a game on for the adults who linger after their last frame. It’s lively without feeling frantic—more like the building has slipped back into what it was meant to be.
Philip Bailey still remembers the moment it started. In 2013, living in St. David’s, he rode past the former Southside Bowl and saw it sitting closed. He stopped so suddenly he still laughs about it. “I literally slammed brakes,” he says. The next day he called the Bermuda Land Development Company, learned the building would require a proposal, and went home to write one—bowling at the centre, with enough around it to make people want to stay.
Bailey’s drive to build something came from an early lesson in responsibility. He grew up in a single-family home where money was tight. His mother had to stop working for medical reasons, and as the eldest of three he started earning young—packing bags at Outerbridge’s Grocery (now Somers Grocery). The pay wasn’t much, but it went toward groceries and savings. By 14, he was working at Robinson’s Drug Store, reading Black Enterprise and paying attention to people who created opportunities instead of waiting for them.
Back then, he told his mother he’d open “a night club, arcade and deliver pizza.” Years later, when he had a shot at Southside, that line became a plan. His proposal didn’t treat bowling as a one-note attraction. It was bowling, plus a restaurant, plus video games, plus pizza delivery through Sargasso—built to work for families, teens, corporate groups, and serious bowlers without making any one crowd feel like they’re borrowing the space.
Today, Strykz operates as a full entertainment hub: glow lanes, updated scoring software, a sports bar, and a sound system designed for more than background noise. Bailey says the real work is in the details—keeping standards high enough that people don’t just come once.
Ask him what’s been toughest and he doesn’t start with machines or imports.