Badgers Volleyball Win Prompts Dugout Tavern To Add Fourth Screen, Hire 'Audio Engineer'

WAUKESHA — Dugout Tavern owner Carl Resh had three televisions running three separate broadcasts most Saturdays this fall, a configuration he describes as 'manageable, barely.' That changed Oct. 25, when Wisconsin's volleyball team beat Michigan in four sets in a match that overlapped with a Badgers football replay and a Brewers front-office press conference nobody asked to have on, forcing Resh to mount a fourth screen above the dartboard corner by 2 p.m. and promote the bar's newest employee to a title he invented on the spot: audio engineer.

The job went to Kyle Dorff, 18, a Dugout Tavern regular since his sister started tending bar there last spring, who will be paid $18 an hour on nights with three or more simultaneous broadcasts. His primary tool is a laminated card, printed at the UPS Store on Sunset Drive for $2.19, that tells him which of the bar's four sound zones should run primary audio, which should run secondary audio through the ceiling speakers near the pool table, and which should be muted entirely regardless of what's happening on screen.

A Fourth Zone, A New Hierarchy

Resh said the card ranks sports by what he calls 'crowd investment,' with football holding primary audio rights over volleyball and baseball in nearly every scenario except a Wisconsin set point, which Dorff is authorized to flag to bar manager Denise Okafor for a manual override. Dorff said he practiced the hierarchy for two hours Friday night using old game footage on mute, timing himself on how fast he could identify which of the four screens needed sound raised without looking at his card.

'By the third set I had it mostly memorized,' Dorff said. 'The hard part isn't the volleyball, it's remembering that baseball never gets primary audio even if something exciting happens, because by the rules nobody in this bar cares about baseball in October anymore except Carl.'

Resh disputed that characterization but confirmed he was the only patron who asked Dorff to raise baseball audio during Saturday's shift, a request Dorff said he logged but declined per the card.

The Volleyball Problem

Okafor said the volleyball broadcast created a specific challenge the card hadn't anticipated: extended silence between rallies that made the room's ambient noise, mostly the football broadcast bleeding over from zone one, sound louder than the match itself. She said Dorff solved this by nudging volleyball's volume up two notches during timeouts and back down during live play, a technique he arrived at without instruction roughly 40 minutes into his first shift.

'Nobody trained him on that,' Okafor said. 'He just started doing it, and it worked, and now it's permanent policy. We wrote it on the card in pen because we ran out of room to reprint it before Saturday.'

"This whole job is going to be obsolete by mid-November when the Packers break everyone's heart again and we're back down to one screen and a lot of silence."

— Gary Puchalski, Dugout Tavern regular and Waukesha city councilman

What Happens To Zone Four

Resh said the fourth screen will stay up through the volleyball postseason at minimum, and possibly longer if Wisconsin keeps winning, though he acknowledged the dartboard corner was not designed for sightlines and at least two regulars complained Saturday that the new screen's glare made it difficult to read the board from the oche. He said he is considering a fifth screen for the bar's back patio but has not assigned a timeline, calling it 'a conversation for after the volleyball team stops giving me reasons to buy more televisions.'

Dorff said he intends to keep the laminated card as a souvenir regardless of how long the position lasts, and that he has already started a second card, unofficial and kept in his back pocket, ranking which regulars are most likely to argue with his audio decisions. Puchalski, he confirmed, is currently ranked first.