Jillian Hiscock, (MEd ‘09), spent her career in higher education and nonprofits. But, when she took a break to regroup, instead of taking a few weeks off, she soon found herself community-building around athletics, and at the start of an unlikely journey that would eventually lead her to open the Midwest's first sports bar that exclusively shows women's sports: A Bar of Their Own in South Minneapolis.
It’s a bit of a departure from her career in higher education.
After years working in admissions at her undergraduate alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College, she went to work her first “official real-time job out at the University of Minnesota, Morris.” It was there that she decided to pursue an advanced degree in one of the first remote cohorts of the higher education leadership master’s program at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD).
“I've always found that I work and learn best in those environments where I'm not just surrounded by people that look, think, and act like me because it’s so easy to live in that comfort zone,” Jillian says. “And I think UMD, and my program in particular, our cohort, was able to build strong relationships over the two years that we were together, to help push people in different ways and think about things.”
“One of the things that I really appreciated about my program,” she said, “was really just this strong sense of community building.” That was true of the eclectic group of classmates, who planned to apply their degrees in admissions, sports, administration, and numerous other fields, but it was especially true for Jillian; her Mom was a classmate.
“She is a character,” says Jillian. Her mother’s college journey had been interrupted when she started a family. Ever-competitive, when Jillian’s older sister was about to begin college, “my mom said, no daughter of mine is going to get a college degree before I do.” Her mother re-enrolled and finished her bachelor's degree. “Then I was the first one to start my master's program and she said, no daughter of mine is going to get their master's degree before I do.”
They graduated together in 2009, traveling to Duluth for commencement and making a whole weekend of it. “It was a really cool experience to do that with her.”
After her MEd, Jillian went on to work in higher education, focusing on admissions, until she moved from central Minnesota to Minneapolis and started working in education-based nonprofits in 2015. After the pandemic and the civil unrest in Minneapolis, Jillian was ready for a break. She quit her job to rest and recalibrate.
Her last day was a Friday, with six weeks of soul-searching ahead of her. By Sunday night, an acquaintance had called, asking if she would help organize volunteers for the women's final four basketball tournament taking place in Minneapolis in 2022. Jillian spent the next four months as an independent contractor coordinating the volunteers. “I've always been a sports nut,” Jillian said, “but it was the first time that I'd actually worked in sports, and I just loved it.”
Jillian first heard of the concept of a women’s sports bar on a debrief call with her co-organizers, when one was talking about The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon, which had just opened. The idea resonated with Jillian and the rest of the organizers. The question going around the group was: Who's going to do this in Minneapolis? “It wasn't going to be me,” said Jillian. “I had no business doing it.”
Over the following year, she watched for the concept to sprout up under someone else’s care. It didn’t, and soon, she was socializing the idea with friends and thinking through all the how’s and what-ifs. Eventually, she decided it was up to her. She officially began working on her own version of a women’s sports bar in July 2023. A Bar of Their Own opened six months later in the spring of 2024, just in time for March Madness.
“I think we all know what a sports bar feels like traditionally, what I call ‘men's sports bars’,” she says. “This just feels fundamentally different when you walk in the door.”
“Even beyond what's just being played on the televisions, we've really prioritized making it an inclusive space for fans of all sports, fans of all genders, fans of all sexual orientations,” she says. “I want it to be a place for anybody who loves or is curious about women's sports to be able to hang out. And I'm really proud that, seven months in, that's absolutely what has happened.”
Watching women's sports in a community setting, she says, is unique and a new experience for most of her patrons.
“It's so cool to see people experience it for the first time,” she says. “It's just different to all be sitting at the bar watching the hockey team score the goal at the same time and the oohs and ahs all happening at the same time.”
It’s still new, but Hiscock is excited to see where it can go. “We just passed our six-month mark,” she said, recognizing she and her team don’t have to do everything all at once, but she’s looking forward to hosting more programming, like watch parties with team affiliations and alumni associations.
“We have some of the top-notch athletic programs that exist at UMD and within other colleges in the community,” she says. “It's exciting to think about connecting people to this place to know that it exists,” she says.
A Bar of Their Own will be hosting one of their first official watch parties coming up soon: Bulldogs Women’s Hockey against the Gophers, played in Duluth on November 15. So if you can’t make it to Duluth, you can cheer on the ‘Dogs there!
“It’s a great opportunity to get Bulldogs together–whether or not they're huge UMD hockey fans.”
For Jillian and many patrons, A Bar of Their Own just feels right. “And that's because we've really curated a place that's built around doing things differently,” she says. “There's this sense among our guests that we've deserved this for so long and it just didn't exist.”
Header and footer image caption: Started by UMD alumna Jillian Hiscock, A Bar of Their Own, in South Minneapolis, plays all women’s sports all the time. Photos by Jordan Wipf, submitted