Milwaukee native Bernell Hooker was a Wisconsin women’s sports trailblazer — spending 25 years coaching women’s basketball; establishing Images of Us Sports in 2002, a Milwaukee nonprofit with the mission of empowering girls through sports; and launching the now-defunct Milwaukee Aces semi-professional women’s basketball team in 2014.
And Hooker wasn’t done yet, even after she and her spouse, Rita Adair, moved to Las Vegas in 2021 following Hooker’s ovarian cancer diagnosis.
“Her dream was to own a women’s sports bar, but she ended up passing away before being able to make that dream come true,” said Adair, who was born and raised in Madison and moved back to the city after Hooker died. “So many people appreciate the work she did in sports, and I wanted to honor her legacy.”
So on Nov. 8, Adair opened Bernell’s, Madison’s first “women-centered” sports bar, located at 2513 Seiferth Road in the building formerly occupied by Red Rooster. At Bernell’s, the TVs are tuned to women’s and men’s sports — with an emphasis on local teams.
“Anything I can get, we’re going to be watching,” Adair said. “Bernell wanted equity and visibility in women’s sports, but she didn’t want it to be just a women’s bar. She wanted it to be an everybody bar, a community bar where everybody comes to watch sports.”
Adair recalled the dismissive responses she received not so long ago upon asking staff at other Madison-area sports bars to tune just one TV to a women’s sports telecast. Finally, one bar agreed to change the channel, but that wasn’t enough, she said.
“In a city like Madison, sports bars should really be showing women’s sports, because our women’s sports teams are fabulous.”
Bernell’s was crowdfunded after Adair’s major financial backer bowed out; a GoFundMe page is still active (gofundme.com/f/lets-build-bernells-legacy) to help sustain the bar long-term.
The place can hold about 100 patrons and serves Adair’s own soul food recipes — she previously owned a bar in Madison before moving to Vegas — and the establishment is upholding Red Rooster’s tradition of hosting live blues on Thursday nights.
“I feel like I’m part of a movement, and not just a new business owner. There is a movement happening across the country where people are supporting women’s sports,” Adair said, citing a video she watched about The Sports Bra, a popular women’s sports bar in Portland, Oregon.
“Most people interviewed were men, but there were a lot of women in the bar. I thought that was interesting, because the men were saying, ‘I never had a chance to see my daughter in a sports bar on TV.’ So there are a lot of men who have others in their family that play sports — maybe their daughters go across the country to college — and now they can go to a bar with their friends and watch it on TV.”
