In conversation with Jillian Hiscock, owner of Minneapolis’s newest all-women’s sports
sports bar, A Bar of Their Own:
Sitting with Jillian Hiscock, you are immediately struck by her high-energy, no-nonsense
approach to what is quickly becoming a meeting place for women’s sports enthusiasts,
athletes, and anyone who wants to watch women’s sports without having to ask the bartender
to change the channel. It’s already there! We talked about influences, what brought the bar
from dream to reality, the obstacles, and most importantly, who Jillian is.
MR – I’d like to start with a little background and talk to you about yourself because that’s the whole point of it. What got you to where you are now? So, did you grow up in a sports family?
JH – Yes. So, my dad played baseball until he was far too old to do it, about 45, in a town ball league. Just got both his knees replaced. I grew up playing tennis, gymnastics, and softball. I was a gymnast from when I was five, picked up tennis in middle school, and played softball since I was six or seven. Very athletic family. All of my siblings played sports. Mom was a cheerleader because Title IX hadn’t been enacted when she was a high school student.
MR – Did she want to play?
JH– Oh yeah. I think she would have been a great gymnast and a really good volleyball player. She’s almost 70 years old and does slalom water skiing once a year just to prove she can do it.
MR – I’m guessing by the jersey on the wall that you were a hockey player?
JH– Actually, I wasn’t. I had two cousins, Tara and Katie, who grew up in Bemidji and played college hockey and skating before they could walk. Katie played at River Falls (Wisconsin) and Tara played D1 at Bemidji State. When I said I was doing this she texted me and asked me if I wanted a Hiscock jersey for the wall. I said heck, yeah.
We didn’t have personalized jerseys when I played, just a T-shirt that we got at the beginning of the season. So that was it. It’s fun to have something that made it seem like I actually played a sport.
MR – So gymnastics, tennis and softball. Those were the big three. Did you play in college?
JH – I went to Gustavus Adolphus (Minneapolis), Division Three, and I tried out for the softball team in the fall. The challenge was that I was a music major, and choir practice and softball practice were at the exact same time, so I chose choir over softball. So, I didn’t play intercollegiate sports. I did play intramural tennis and softball but never played at the college level. But I had a great college experience, I was a super fan, and still loved playing. It was probably good for my body to take a break.
MR – OK, we can now cut to this: what was the prime motivator for opening the bar?
JH – I was definitely inspired by Jenny Nguyen, who opened the Sports Bra in Portland. They opened in February of 2022. Hearing Jenny’s experiences about watching the Notre Dame Final Four women’s basketball game and being the only people watching it in a huge bar, having to beg the bartender to put the game on, and then cheering like crazy when they won and nobody around them knew what was happening around them.
That really resonated with me because I’ve had that happen so many times as a women’s sports fan, so I think it was that motivation, eye-opening like it doesn’t have to be this way, where we wouldn’t be the only
people watching the game in a big bar. What if we didn’t have to ask the bartenders to change
the channel and it was just on when we walked in? Those were the things that resonated with a
lot of women’s sports fans, for sure.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me to make the decision was when I was sitting in a sports bar in downtown Minneapolis while the Gopher softball team was playing in the national tournament. We were 2 1/2 miles from campus, and the team was playing in Washington. It was on an ESPN channel, not some crazy streaming service, and I kept asking if they could get the game on, and they said no, we’re not really sure if we can.
It was a big sports bar, not a hole in the wall, and they were playing college football games from the previous fall. I was sitting at the bar, talking to a woman bartender, very frustrated, telling her that this was a team located only 2 1/2 miles from where we’re sitting right now, they’re local women’s Division 1 team, and you can’t find a way to play them? That was the moment when I said, I’m done, I’m sick of this.
MR – Are there similarities between your bar and The Sports Bra?
JH – There are three other Sports Bars that are currently open. The Sports Bra in Portland is the first one, and then there’s Rough & Tumble Pub in Seattle and Icarus Wings and Things in Salem, Oregon. My wife and I were able to go out to Portland and Seattle, and I would say there are absolute similarities, such as how the places feel, which is hard to quantify. The Sports Bra, for me, was particularly powerful. Jennie, the owner, has been an absolute dream as I’ve been going through this process.
Answering questions, providing motivation, and giving me the “yep, I went through that, too. You’ll get through it, and you’ll figure it out.” So walking in there, I mean, we hadn’t even finalized the purchase of this space, so walking in there and seeing it was like, “dang, we can do this, back home, we can do this thing.” So yeah, there are similarities, like lifting up women vendors into women’s sports and having women-owned beers on tap, highlighting women-owned distilleries and women-owned food companies on our menu, and things like that.
We’re really trying to take beyond just what’s on the screens. There are wonderful differences to make us unique within our niche because Minnesota is so different from other markets. We have virtually every women’s professional sports team except soccer, although we have the Aurora, which is a semipro soccer team.
So we have this massive women’s sports community, and the support that we’ve had from all of those teams has just been incredible. So getting that kind of support is consistent across all of the bars, but I think it has been really special to see how it all played out in Minneapolis.
MR – So the big support comes from the Minnesota Lynx and the Minnesota PWHL team?
JH – The Aurora, the Vixen (women’s professional football), the Roller Derby, the professional Ultimate Frisbee team, I mean, we have everything. Australian Rules football, we have every professional women’s sports team that you could possibly imagine here, like some I didn’t even know about. I didn’t know much about Ultimate Frisbee or Australian Rules football, but all those teams are reaching out.
And not just professional teams. We have strong adult rec leagues here, like WHAM, the Women’s Hockey Association of Minnesota, which is the largest women’s adult hockey league in the country, based here in Minneapolis.
MR – I had no idea…
JH – Yeah, my wife plays on one of the teams. There’s an adult soccer league, there’s literally
everything, even a hurling club. And it goes down to the youth level. I mean, the pipeline that we
have here in Minnesota is so powerful cause strong youth leagues lead to strong adult
leagues.
MR – Are you connected to the collegiate teams as well?
JH -Yeah, and not just the Division 1 like the University of Minnesota, the University of St.
Thomas, things like that. I went to Gustavus Adolphus and worked at the MIAC (Minnesota). Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) because I was a Division III sports fiend. We were playing the Division III Women’s Hockey National Championship game. We’ve shown the Division III Basketball National Championship game. I have connections with a lot of the local Division III colleges, which has been fun and uplifting for them, along with the Gophers and Iowa other teams as well.
* This is Part 1 of the interview with Jillian Hiscock, the owner of A Bar of Their Own. Part 2 will be coming soon.
For more information, check out A Bar of Their Own.
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