Since 1984 Waldo’s Sports Center has been the go-to archery and hunting store in Columbia, and it has been under owner Donald Rawls’ control since he purchased the business from Waldo Cleland in 2003.
Rawls said he has wanted to own a store like Waldo’s since he was a kid, and it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
“I had heard rumors that Waldo may be interested in selling, and I found that hard to believe. I just called him one night,” he said. “I told him I was very interested in trying to buy it. We had two or three meetings, got everything finalized and been rolling ever since.”
The store began as strictly an archery business but now sells more guns than archery equipment and has expanded into other areas.
“We’ve added a lot of clothes and boots, expanded the reloading and now we sell corn, feed, seed and fertilizer. We have an indoor shooting range,” Rawls said. “We’ve added a lot of features, especially since we moved onto the highway.”
The knowledge and experience of Waldo’s employees — Rawls, Ricky McDaniel, Scott Ross and Cody Ford — far exceeds what customers will find at bigger hunting chain stores.
“There’s a lot of old-school experience here that these new stores and box stores don’t have. A guy came in here Tuesday after he had bought a gun and a scope at (a Hattiesburg chain store), and they couldn’t mount the scope for him and stripped the scope mounts out. They didn’t know what they were doing, so he had to come to us for us to put it together to get him out in the field. They don’t have the employees that have that kind of knowledge. That’s where we come in,” Rawls explained. “We hunt and have hands-on experience.”
That leads to the Sports Center receiving a lot of out-of-town business as well. Rawls estimated roughly 60 percent of its business comes from the surrounding areas, and the fact that there are no other local hunting and archery stores adds to it.
“We hear story after story of customers going to places and asking questions that they don’t have a clue how to answer. Ninety-nine percent of them, we can get them going in the right direction. It’s personal service,” he said. “We do a lot of hands on — mounting scopes, tuning bows, loading corn, hand loading — you have to have done it through the years to know what you’re talking about. That’s what sets us apart because we’ve been there, done that in most scenarios.”
The indoor archery range is up to 20 yards that people can practice any time in, and Waldo’s hosts an archery league for any age that shoots every other Thursday night. The league will begin again as deer season ends for about three months through spring into early summer.
Rawls said having the range is a blessing for archery customers.
“I sell somebody a bow, I can take them in there, let them shoot, work with them on their form and get their sights set. That way when they leave here, they’re going down the right road versus getting home and having trouble,” he said. “We try to get all of the kinks worked out in there.”
One of the hottest items at Waldo’s right now is the new 2019 Mathews Vertix bow, and Rawls encourages customers to come in and test it out, along with other bows, so they are prepared for bow season.
“I’d much rather sell someone a bow in February, March and April versus them buying it a week before bow season. That way we can get all the kinks out of it and get it broke in,” he said. “That way when they get out there on opening morning, they’re not having system failure.”
Rawls works with the archery programs at Columbia Academy, West Marion and Columbia High School and helps service their bows.
Waldo’s Sports Center is open from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and until noon on Saturday and can be reached at (601) 736-9455.
Pictured Above: From left, Scott Ross, Cody Ford, Donald Rawls and Ricky McDaniel are the experts in all things archery and hunting at Waldo’s Sports Center. | Photo by Joshua Campbell
