Lexington now has an indoor mini-golf course, named Lex Lynx, located next to the Stonewall Jackson cemetery. Lex Lynx is open to the public on Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 1p.m. to 5 p.m., at a rate of $5 for the first round and $2 for replays. Additionally, Lex Lynx is open for private bookings Monday through Thursday and from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Gavin Fox, Washington and Lee University Associate Professor of Business Administration, has applied his academic skills to the world of entertainment, in order to bring Rockbridge County and Lexington a viable option for family friendly recreation.

Originally, Fox was not planning to open a mini-golf course specifically; he had planned to open incubator-accelerator space, a concept he extracted from his studies.

“An incubator accelerator space is a place where startups go to really launch, so incubation is about trying to generate the idea and gain traction,” said Fox. “Acceleration is once you’ve got that idea and you’re launched, it’s sort of that next phase where you’re pushing heavy into the marketing, trying to seek venture capital.”

In a series of meetings, Ben Grigsby, the owner of the Rockbridge building, and Will Moore, one of Grigsby’s acquaintances, informed Fox of an available space downtown that could be converted into a business space. Last April, Fox pounced on the opportunity, hoping to bring greater entertainment capabilities to Lexington.

“At the time, my wife and I were discussing the fact that there’s nothing to do with kids in this town, so we started thinking about a kids museum, because we love going over the mountain to Lynchburg, and up to Harrisonburg, and down to Roanoke,” said Fox. “They’ve got these cool places and we were like, ‘why don’t we have something like that here?”’

Fox planned to gain the funding for the children’s museum from a non-profit organization that his wife was working with. However, the non-profit could not provide the adequate funding in the near future, which was an issue, since Fox would be paying a mortgage on the building, without reward.

“So, we thought, well, what can we do in the interim?” said Fox. “We started going through things like indoor paintball and then we just started seeing liability and people slipping and hurting themselves and we wanted something that was low cost, low liability.”  

Fox began to seek inspiration for ideas that could fill the space in the meantime, eventually coming across what would become his business.

“We were actually out at Bryce Mountain, skiing with the family, and they’ve got a mini-golf thing at the bottom of the hill and my dad and I came down off of one of the inner tube things and we stood there for a second and went: mini-golf,” said Fox. “How is someone gonna hurt themselves playing mini-golf?”

After deciding to bring a mini-golf course to Lexington, Fox took it upon himself to construct the course as a summer project, doing much of the manual labor himself, with the assistance of his father, a civil engineer.

“There’s a lot of pride in it for me to be able to construct something and go: I did 90 percent of this, To actually see that come to fruition is one of the things that excites me most,” said Fox.

In addition to opening the children’s museum, once the funding becomes available, in the future, Fox hopes to expand Lex Lynx to become more serviceable to the community, as a party space and, during the nighttime, a bar.

“If this is successful, I’d like to do something akin to a Dave and Buster’s kind of thing here in this town, so you’ve got all these entertainment things and people that are underage can come and play during the day, have a good time, come after middle school [or] high school, and hang out,” said Fox.  “[The] bar [would be] shut down on a different floor and then you open up to the adult drinking population after hours to be able to do that downtown.”

Lex Lynx opened its doors to the public for the first time on Sept.17, and hosted a grand opening on Oct. 14, from 4-7, with free golf, free door prizes, and Lex Mex Tacos.