Waukesha Bars Stock Up For Back-To-Back Badgers Volleyball Weekends; 'Marathoners Need Snacks,' Says Manager

WAUKESHA — With the Wisconsin Badgers women's volleyball team hosting Washington on Friday and Minnesota on Saturday, three downtown bars placed supply orders Thursday afternoon that staff described as roughly double the usual weekend load.

Dugout Tavern manager Keith Morrison, 44, said he ordered 240 wings for the two-night stretch, up from a typical Friday-Saturday total of 110. He also added four extra cases of Spotted Cow and moved his walk-in cooler's cheese curds to the front shelf "for faster retrieval."

"People think football is the volume night," Morrison said. "Back-to-back ranked volleyball is a marathon. Marathoners need snacks."

Two nights, one keg math

At Lenny's Depot Lounge on Broadway, bartender Dana Fiore, 29, said she requested an extra half-barrel of Spotted Cow and pre-sliced 14 pounds of jalapenos Wednesday night in anticipation of Friday's nacho demand. She said she tracks beer pour volume by marker lines on the keg handle rather than a formal gauge, a method she called "close enough for volleyball."

The third bar, Milwaukee Street's The Rally Point, posted a sign Thursday morning reading "TWO NIGHTS. ONE TAB IF YOU'RE BRAVE." Owner Carl Westlin, 57, said he special-ordered a second nacho warmer tray after last month's run against Nebraska left customers waiting 11 minutes for a refill.

Westlin said volleyball crowds skew different from football crowds in ways that matter for ordering. "Football, people nurse a beer for a quarter. Volleyball sets move fast, so they're up at the bar between sets instead of during a commercial break. You get these little sprints of orders," he said.

The schedule problem

All three managers cited the same scheduling quirk: Friday's first serve against Washington is set for 6 p.m., while Saturday's match against Minnesota starts at 7 p.m., a one-hour shift that Morrison said has already caused confusion among at least six regulars who showed up to Dugout Tavern an hour early on Thursday under the mistaken impression the games had already started.

"I told them it's Friday and Saturday, not today and tomorrow. They looked at their phones like the schedule owed them an apology."

— Keith Morrison, manager, Dugout Tavern

Fiore said Lenny's Depot Lounge printed a laminated card behind the bar listing both tip-off times after a similar mix-up last season during a doubleheader against Purdue and Ohio State, which she said "nobody has fully forgiven us for getting wrong on the chalkboard."

Wings versus curds

Morrison said his wing order, while record-setting for a volleyball weekend, still falls short of the 310 wings Dugout Tavern moved during last January's Packers playoff game, a figure he keeps taped inside the walk-in cooler door as an internal benchmark. He said he does not expect volleyball to ever surpass it but considers 240 "a respectable number for a sport without a halftime."

Westlin, who stocked an additional 40 pounds of cheese curds at The Rally Point, said he weighs cooking oil demand against wing demand every weekend using a notebook he keeps by the register, a system he has maintained since 2023 and declined to digitize. "Spreadsheets crash. Notebooks don't," he said.

All three bars said they plan to keep televisions tuned to the Big Ten Network for both matches, with contingency plans to split screens if the Brewers' simultaneous road game draws a vocal minority of customers demanding a channel change.

Fiore said she has already fielded two requests to switch one television to the Brewers game during Friday's volleyball match, both of which she denied on the grounds that "the wing order was placed around volleyball, not baseball, and the kitchen doesn't owe anyone flexibility it didn't budget for."