The disco ball was still spinning Sunday night when Kolby Martin handed Alexandria Coleman a pair of rental skates, the same transaction that had happened at Skate Zone thousands of times over 46 years. Outside, in the seating area, Nikki Hudson, Jordan Vernon and Cameron Shumpert laced up under the flashing lights for what everyone in the building already knew was the last one. By Tuesday, the rink on North Lehmberg Road would close for good.
Freddie Williams was there too. He taught his son to skate at Skate Zone about 20 years ago, and that son can now outskate him, though Williams kept trying anyway. He used to come two or three times a weekend, back when his legs were in better shape. He cut it down to once a week as they got older. When he heard about the final Soul Night, he and his son knew they had to show up one more time to roll around the space where Williams says he met so many of his friends.
Skate Zone is not becoming another restaurant or a strip mall vacancy. Owner Dale Taylor is redeveloping the building into a D-BAT baseball and softball training academy, set to open in December. The swap tells you something about where organized activity for kids in Columbus is actually headed, and it is not a subtle shift. It is happening in the exact same building.
A Rink Built Into a Family's History
Taylor opened his first rink as Skating Odyssey on Highway 45 in 1980, then built the current Lehmberg Road location in 1995. Over his career he built or held interests in about six rinks across the region, including locations in Meridian and Tupelo, and his Starkville rink, run by Harley Middleton, will stay open even as Columbus changes hands.
The Columbus location carried more than business history for Taylor's family. His youngest daughter had her first birthday party at Skate Zone. Another daughter, Crystal Anderson Fisher, ran the rink for years and was known locally for mentoring young skaters, until she died in 2019 from a brain tumor at age 35. Her visitation and funeral were held inside the rink she had managed.
When the closure announcement went up on Skate Zone's Facebook page in early August, local DJ and emcee Rick "Don't Go" Mason started getting messages asking him to run one final Soul Night. He and Taylor put it together together, giving longtime regulars a chance to gather once more before the lights went off.
"I did have one other daughter that ran the Skate Zone, and she passed away," Taylor said of the decision to close after 46 years in Columbus. "My youngest daughter had her first birthday at Skate Zone."
What Moves In By December
The building at 910 North Lehmberg Road will reopen this December as a D-BAT Baseball and Softball Academy, bringing automated batting cages, pitching lanes and a retail pro shop. D-BAT was founded in 1998 and franchised in 2007, and has grown into a network of nearly 200 indoor training centers nationwide. Individual franchise startup costs typically run between $500,000 and $1 million, according to industry figures, which gives a sense of the capital now aimed at a stretch of road that spent nearly five decades as a skating rink.
Taylor is betting some of his old customer base follows him into the new venture. "Baseball and softball are in a growth mode, and all my grandkids are real big into the sports and stuff," he said. "We're hoping that we can keep our story going with that."
The Building Two Doors Down Explains the Timing
Skate Zone's closure fits a national pattern on paper. Roughly 2,900 commercial roller rinks remain operating across the country, down from an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 during the industry's late-1970s and 1980s peak, as video games and streaming pulled young people's leisure time elsewhere. That is a real trend, but it is not the whole story in Columbus, because the same plot of land is not going dark. It is being repurposed for a specific, well-funded alternative that already has momentum on the ground.
Less than a mile from the old rink, at 560 Lehmberg Road, the Lowndes County Recreation Department runs structured baseball and softball leagues for kids ages 3 to 12. Three years before Skate Zone's last Soul Night, in August 2023, Lowndes County officials partnered with BankFirst to build BankFirst Yards, a $12 million youth sports complex along Highway 82 with eight turf fields designed to host regional tournaments. That is not a modest rec-league upgrade. It is a nine-figure fraction of local infrastructure spending pointed squarely at organized youth baseball and softball, built before the rink even announced it was closing.
Put those two facts next to each other and the D-BAT deal stops looking like an isolated business decision and starts looking like a landing spot for demand that county money had already identified. Taylor did not need to guess where families were spending their time and dollars. The recreation department's league registration and the BankFirst Yards turf fields were the evidence, sitting less than a mile down the same road.
What This Means for How Columbus Spends Its Weekends
For 46 years, a Saturday night option in Columbus meant showing up at a rink with no team, no schedule and no roster, just skates and a DJ. Rick Mason building one last Soul Night around Skate Zone's closing was, in part, an acknowledgment that this kind of open, unscheduled gathering space is what the town is losing. What replaces it on Lehmberg Road is the opposite model: registration, leagues, tournaments, training packages. The infrastructure dollars in Lowndes County over the past three years have followed that second model almost exclusively.
None of this means Columbus families have stopped wanting a place to just show up and hang out. It means the building that used to serve that need is now serving a different one, and the county's biggest recent capital investments were already pointed that direction before the rink ever posted its closing announcement on Facebook.
The last skaters filed out under the disco lights on Sunday night. By December, the same square footage on Lehmberg Road will be measuring pitch speeds instead of spinning a ball overhead. Whatever Columbus loses in casual gathering space, it appears to be trading for something the county had already decided to fund.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood's daily rhythms, from a closing rink to a new training academy, might mean for where you want to plant roots in the Golden Triangle, Delta-Gulf Real Estate Corporation knows this stretch of Columbus block by block. Explore Our Properties.
