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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Anatomy of a night out at Sports

How the Walnut establishment became king of the bar scene

It's Friday night, a few ticks past midnight at Kilroy's Sports Bar. Girls are huddled together in line outside, shivering without coats as they wait for the patrons in front of them to get their IDs checked, pay cover and enter the establishment.\nInside, it's still relatively quiet. In the rather spacious lower level, some sit in booths, while others are posted up at the main bar, glancing at the large array of flatscreen TVs now and then, as they chat with old, or perhaps, new friends.\nCall it the calm before the storm.\nBecause within the hour, the place will swell. It will be packed, crowded and alive. It will be full of customers entertaining themselves in a seemingly endless string of activities. Some will be dancing upstairs, some will be playing pool near the back of the first floor, some, no matter how cold it is, will be drinking and smoking cigarettes on the bar's second-floor patio. Others will be downstairs, dodging in and out of the throngs of people, gulping drinks with friends as the night becomes increasingly blurry in their minds.\nBehind the hustle and bustle of this weekend crowd at Sports, stands the Prall sisters, managers Maggie and Liza.\nThink of them as the conductors of a large orchestra, simultaneously overseeing 850 patrons of their 14,000-square-foot, two-story establishment and heading a staff that can reach nearly 80 employees on the busiest of nights.\nAfter working in different capacities under the Kilroy's umbrella, Maggie and Liza came to Sports as managers in early 2004 and set out to consistently fill the spacious bar by making it a spot where everyone in town felt welcome. With this school year's spike in popularity, their goals seem to be coming to fruition.\n"When we came back to this store to run it together, we both sat down and said 'It's 14,000 square feet-- how are we going to fill this place consistently?'" Maggie said. "We had to really broaden our horizons and open the doors and please a lot bigger demographic than anybody else in town."\nOne of their first tasks was the placement of the DJ. Live music has been a staple of Sports since the mid-90s, but Maggie and Liza decided its popularity had dwindled a bit. The DJ had been downstairs and the live music on the top level prior to their arrival, but they made the decision to put the DJ on the second floor.\n"When we first got together and we needed a goal, the only thing that was very successful was the DJ," said Maggie. "If we got the people upstairs, then all we had to do was fill the downstairs, which is a lot easier to do because it's right inside the doors."\nAfter the upstairs was remodeled and the DJ was in place, their attention moved to the downstairs, which they remodeled this past summer with such elements as flatscreen TVs, a long bar on the south end of the first level and new paint on the walls, switching from green -- a Kilroy's staple since 1971 -- to brick red.\nNext, the sisters decided to restructure what they offered on select nights. Two weeks before first semester began, they decided to serve all drinks half-price on Wednesdays.\n"We fixed our Wednesdays overnight, which, for us, was a high-five," Maggie said. "Obviously, we make very little to no money on Wednesdays ... but our employees make good money and the customers are having the time of their lives and that makes them want to come back on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and any other Sunday that they might come out."\nSenior Jason Bowman, a frequent Sports patron, said the Wednesday night special that Sports offered early last semester kept him coming back all year.\n"I only went to Sports once last year," said Bowman. "'Half-price Wednesdays' is what brought me and my friends to Sports. It's always a good time, so we keep going back." Liza said the notion of a half-off night started out as a joke. But it eventually stuck and Maggie, who was wary of such a drastic change at first, was eventually convinced.\n"I had worked Wednesdays and they were dismal," Liza said. "It's tough to see this huge bar when we're slow. It's cry-yourself-to-sleep, it's painful."\nAnother institutional change made as first semester got underway was to feature dueling pianos on Thursday nights, something they'd been trying to pull off since last spring.\nIn addition to the new look, the nightly specials and the restructured entertainment lineup, Liza said they strive for each room to have a different atmosphere to appeal to the bar's diverse clientele. From the casual pool room in the back of the first floor, to the dance club vibe upstairs, there's a little bit of everything inside the Walnut Street establishment.\n"I think we're the most diverse bar in town," Liza said. "Every age, every color, every everything. You go upstairs, you go downstairs, anywhere you're at in the place it's a melting pot." \nAlthough Sports might be the "it" spot of the moment, Liza said that can change in an instant, as has happened to the bar in years past.\n"Because we were so hot for so long, some people were just sick of it," she said. "Same thing with (Kilroy's on) Kirkwood -- they're not necessarily doing anything different this semester, but people were there six nights a week last semester or last year, and now the whole thing kind of shifts, which we've experienced over the years." \nFor now, in the cyclical-patron cycle that is the Bloomington bar scene, Sports seems to have a firm hold on the market.

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