Kinsley Schernikau could easily have been describing a pack of 10-year-old boys on Wednesday.
Some just want to play, she said. Others want to hang out and watch.Â
"And there are some that want to run, run, run — and wrestle," she said. "It's kind of our job to just make sure they are playing appropriately and that we deescalate anything before it turns into anything big."
Adventures in babysitting, right?
She was actually referring to her job as a member of the paw patrol, a group charged with keeping order at Off Leash, Lincoln's first dog bar, which opened last week at 1975 M St.
Its opening comes a week before Lincoln's second dog bar — Urban Hound — is scheduled to open at 48th and Van Dorn streets.
The dog bar concept is not new. Virtually every major city has one. Yelp has a list of the top 25 dog bars in America. Omaha entered into the fray in February 2021 with a 12,000-square-foot dog park, bar and eatery.
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And that's what caught Brandon Akert's attention.Â
The Lincoln native and University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate has flexed his entrepreneurial muscles by co-owning a catering business and Gate 25, a Haymarket bar that will celebrate its 10th anniversary in late August.
But a dog bar — a new challenge in an untapped market — scratched a hard-to-reach itch that had everything to do with his love for dogs.
"This concept is not unique by any means," he said. "But I've always had an affinity for it. It's a classic thing where it's stuck to the coasts and starts in the south, and just takes forever to get (to Nebraska)."
Ryenne Leising, a bartender at both Gate 25 and Off Leash, said she thought Akert was joking when he told her of the dog bar idea. Slowly, she said she warmed to the idea.
"There's nowhere in Lincoln like it," said Leising, who owns a golden retriever named Soren. "A lot of people with dogs feel like their dogs are their kids. And so it's a place you can bring dogs. It's a place you can actually bring your dog and you know that it's OK for them."
Off Leash is housed in a former auto body shop. Its high ceilings, 8,000-square-feet of indoor and outdoor space provide dogs with plenty of room to play.
The outdoor area features a child's pool and AstroTurf to run on. Inside, polished concrete floors and a garage door that is open in the summer allows them to run inside and out.
Meanwhile, a number of tables — inside and out — offer dog owners a place to sit and relax with a drink while their dogs play.
There is also an area where food is allowed and dogs are required to be on leash, while their owners can eat something, play a board game or just unwind.
The bar is free to people, but a day pass for their dog is $10. Monthly and yearly passes are also available.
There was one day last week when there were 31 dogs in the bar at once and Akert said there were no major issues.
"It felt very comfortable and all the dogs were interacting," he said. "That shows we were really good at getting to it before any sort of incident happened."
There will be episodes, Akert acknowledged. Dogs, like everyone, play with different levels of enthusiasm.
Akert mentioned one dog that liked to run, creating a track that started in the outdoor play area and circled inside and back to where he began. The dog urged a handful of other dogs to run with him. By the time their convoy was complete, a dozen or so dogs had formed a furry hazard to everyone around them.
And there were other dogs that didn't like it. Some barked. Others growled. It had the potential for a fight, but it was quickly halted.
"I thought the dogs were gonna be getting in fights all the time, but there really hasn't been that many issues, which actually surprised me a lot," Leising said.
Dogs that do get out of line are put into doggie timeout, a caged area, for a minimum of 10 minutes, which he said will eventually teach them proper behavior.
Rules are rules. There are no folded newspapers to the snout, but dogs are expected to abide by the rules — as are their owners.
Before entering the bar that is guarded by two chain-link gates an online disclaimer must be completed.
"We're kind of like a theme park and the theme is dogs, right?" he said. "And so we do run a risk that people could get bit or people could interact wrong."
Dogs, according to the law, are technically personal property — the responsibility of the owner, Akert said. The waiver makes that clear from the outset.
"The waivers is a level of protection for insurance purposes and everything in between," he said.