Badgers Volleyball Upset Fills Dugout Tavern; Manager Hunts Fourth TV

WAUKESHA — Rick Holmstrom planned to close Dugout Tavern's back room Sunday night, run a skeleton crew of one bartender, and watch the Milwaukee Brewers' offseason highlight show on low volume until last call. Instead, the Wisconsin Badgers women's volleyball team beat No. 6 Iowa in four sets, and Holmstrom spent the evening hunting for a television he was fairly sure he still owned.

Holmstrom, who has owned the Grand Avenue bar for eleven years, said he staffed Sunday for a crowd of maybe a dozen, the number he typically gets for a regular-season volleyball match on a night with no football competing for screen space. By 7:40 p.m., with Wisconsin up two sets to one, Dugout Tavern had 62 people in a building Holmstrom says comfortably seats 54.

"I had the notepad out again. I thought that part of my life was over," Holmstrom said, referring to a TV-allocation tracking sheet he kept behind the register through October's Brewers-Packers scheduling disputes and had not touched since the World Series ended. "This is the first time the notepad has ever been about volleyball. I didn't have a column for it. I had to make one."

The fourth television

Dugout Tavern runs eight screens on a normal night, but only two were tuned to the Big Ten Network when the match started, since Holmstrom said he had no reason to expect demand beyond the regulars who already follow the team. By the second set, both screens had six or seven people standing behind every seated patron, and Holmstrom moved the match to a third bank near the dartboards, displacing a trivia rerun nobody was watching anyway.

When a fourth request came in from a table unable to see any of the three banks, Holmstrom said he remembered a projector purchased in 2023 for a retirement party and never used again, stored in a closet behind the kitchen along with a folding screen he hadn't unrolled since. It took him and one bartender fourteen minutes to find an extension cord long enough to reach an outlet, during which Wisconsin won the third set without anyone in the back room seeing it live.

"Unusual for women's volleyball, having to improvise seating like that. Good, but unusual. I've never once had to go looking for a projector because of a four-set match."

— Rick Holmstrom, owner, Dugout Tavern, 47

Table eight relocates

Carla Besch, 44, who organized a party of eight for what she described as a "low-key Sunday thing," said her group had been seated near the shuffleboard table, a spot with a clear sightline to exactly none of Dugout Tavern's screens. Besch said she asked a bartender directly whether the group could move once it became clear the match would go four sets, specifying that she wanted "an actual screen, not somebody's phone held up across the room," a scenario she said had already happened once that night at a neighboring table.

Holmstrom relocated Besch's party to two tables pushed together in front of the newly deployed projector screen, displacing a pair of regulars who, according to Holmstrom, accepted a round of drinks on the house and did not file a written complaint, a distinction he said he appreciated after the fall he'd had.

Dale Tackett, 58, a Dugout Tavern regular who has turned up in this paper's coverage of the bar's television disputes before, said he arrived expecting his usual stool and found it occupied by someone he did not recognize standing on it to see over the crowd. Tackett said he relocated to the end of the bar and watched the fourth set entirely through the reflection in a beer mirror, which he called "not ideal, but accurate enough to follow the score."

A refreshing problem

Holmstrom said the influx of first-time Sunday patrons, many of whom he said identified themselves as recent alumni or parents of club volleyball players, was "refreshing but logistically challenging," and that he has already discussed with his staff whether to budget for a bigger crowd the next time Wisconsin volleyball plays a ranked opponent on a weekend night. He said the projector and screen will stay assembled in the back room through the rest of the season rather than returning to the closet.

Besch said her group plans to return for Wisconsin's next nationally ranked matchup, this time with a reservation request filed in advance. Holmstrom said Dugout Tavern does not currently take reservations but that he would "think about it," a phrase he said he has learned, after eleven years of ownership, to treat as a promise to nobody in particular.