♪♪ -It was like this step back in time.

Half the alleys still allow smoking.

A lot of them still take score on chalkboards.

I mean, there's human pinsetters.

-It is totally a team sport because as you can see, there is no individual scoring kept.

It all -- Everybody's added together, and it comes up to one cumulative score.

-Point of the game is to knock everything down kind of like 10-pin.

But with 9-pin, if you get just the red one standing, you get three extra points with it.

-It's just this totally different species of bowling that has survived for so long.

9-pin bowling has roots in Germany.

Germans started moving here in the 1830s, and they brought 9-pin with them.

At its height, 9-pin was in pretty much every major city in Texas.

It came to the point where we are today, where there are only 18 9-pin alleys that I know of left in the whole U.S., and they're all clustered in the rural areas around the city of San Antonio.

I spent like half a year at least, just going to league nights, going to tournaments, and the more I learned, the more fascinating it got, because I started learning about some of the challenges that were not obvious on the face and some of the biggest threats that 9-pin is currently facing.

-There's -- There just hasn't been any money, so... -A lot of bowling alleys are really losing that bridge to the next generation.

♪♪ They still have pool nights there, but the bowling hasn't happened since 2012.

-It was family.

They got close.

They got close.

It was like a family gathering.

♪♪ Now it's what it is, I guess.