NO MORE BEER DRINKING AT THIS HEALTH CLUB.

A Janesville health club has discontinued an anomaly it first offered during the racquetball craze of the 1980s. The mini-bar at the Janesville Athletic Club lives on, but the days of club members being able to order a post-workout draft beer or glass of wine are gone. Owner Mark Groshan said he decided in mid-May not to renew a Class B liquor license that for years had allowed the health club at 1301 Black Bridge Road to serve beer and wine to members at the small bar built into the front desk area. It closes the book on an unusual amenity for a health club, one that few gyms anywhere still offer. Groshan said the club’s suds and vino service started in the mid-1980s under prior owners who ran the facility as a racquetball club. Players would stop at the bar after matches to socialize and drain a draft beer or two. Since then, the club has knocked out all but two of its racquetball courts amid a decline in the sport’s popularity. It has shifted in recent years to a full-service activity center with a focus on group classes and 24-hour workout services. Groshan said demand for beer and wine at the club bar was tapering off when he bought the facility in 1999 and has continued to wane. “It never was a big revenue generator for us, and use had declined to the point it wasn’t even paying for itself to serve the beer and wine,” he said. The bar remains in place, Groshan said. Staff at the front continue to man it but now serve softer offerings: soda, juice, Gatorade and the signature baskets of fresh popcorn. He said people still use the bar even though it’s dry. “We’re still a very social atmosphere, which is what it was about. Members still sit at the bar and tables. They have pop and popcorn, and hang out and talk like always,” he said. Tami Montgomery-Henriksen, a marketing director for the National Independent Health Club Association, a Minnesota-based nonprofit consulting group, said beer and wine bars at health clubs are a rarity. Of her group’s 800 member health clubs, she knows of only two that still have alcohol service and a bar on site. “It’s definitely not the norm. It’s one of those things, maybe, where independent clubs might have it as a touch that sets them apart as a community place,” Montgomery-Henriksen said. Groshan said he knows of just a few gyms in Wisconsin that still have bars with beer and wine. One is a large health club in Sun Prairie, and a few others are in Milwaukee, he said. “There aren’t many still out there,” he said.