The first thing you notice isn't the axes. It's the feeling — the feeling that you have entered another simpler time. Somewhere in the back, a hatchet thuds into Cottonwood. A group of strangers erupts in a cheer for a woman who just stuck her very first throw, and she turns around wide-eyed like she can't quite believe what her own body just did. A few lanes over, a grandmother in her seventies has just knocked her grandson's score clean out of the water, and he is, to put it charitably, being humbled in real time.
This is a Tuesday night at Ironside Axe Club, tucked into a University Avenue storefront in West Des Moines, and if you walked in expecting a sports bar with sharp objects, you'd be wrong. What Lisa and Scott Gardner have built here is closer to a tavern from another century — a place where the lights are warm, the brand leans gloriously medieval, and the goal, stated plainly and often, is that you leave happier than you came in.
Scott has been throwing axes since 1993. Back then, it wasn't a trend, a league, or a date-night idea — it was just something he loved, and it was how he made some of his closest friendships. Over the decades, he went deep: axes, knives, spears, archery. He eventually took charge of safety and instructor training for a historical re-enactment organization, which means by the time he opened a business, he'd already spent years teaching people how to throw.
Around 2015, he and Lisa started watching something happen. Axe-throwing business was exploding in Canada. Then Chicago. Then Minneapolis. "We kind of saw the wave coming our direction," Lisa says. In 2018, they caught the first real year of the World Axe Throwing League and opened Ironside in West Des Moines. Their grand opening drew 150 people through the door. It was a free event, sure, but the signal was unmistakable. By the time school was back in session that fall and Saturdays started running them off their feet, they knew they had something special.
Neither of them had run a brick-and-mortar business before. Scott handles the creative and instructional side; Lisa takes care of the back office operations. They understood the sport and had a vision for the brand — Scott is the artist of the operation, and you can see his hand in every inch of Ironside's medieval-tavern aesthetic, from the signage to the lighting to the way a night there feels styled rather than thrown together. What they had to learn on the fly was everything else: payroll, leases, the back-office math of keeping a business alive through a pandemic, and — the thing Lisa was most anxious about at the beginning — hiring people who could teach the sport the way Scott teaches it.
"We've learned a lot about each other," Scott says of running a business together. "How resilient we can both be in different situations." Lisa adds, with a laugh, "And where our breaking points are." There were sacrifices, and they're honest about them. Work-life balance, Scott says, "is not an idea when you're an entrepreneur. It doesn't ever work out the way you think it would." You do it because you believe in the long game, and you believe you are building something good.
What it actually feels like inside
Here's the thing most people get wrong about Ironside before they walk in: they think it's going to be loud, chaotic, vaguely dangerous, and vaguely expensive. It's none of those things.
The throwing lanes have room to breathe. The decor leans into Scott's love of medieval and Renaissance pageantry, but not in a costume-shop way — more like a tavern that just happens to exist in 2026, where the wood feels honest, and the details reward a second look. Every single person who walks through the door gets coached. Not just the nervous ones. Everyone. Because there's a window of motion that has to go right for an axe to rotate once and stick in the wood, and once you know it, you know it. The whole place is built around getting you to that moment as quickly and safely as possible.
What surprises people is how quickly they can actually do this. "Axe throwing is easy to learn," Lisa says. "It has a quick learning curve. You get moderately okay pretty fast. To get really good — that's where it slows down." Scott has a line he's used for years: "It's a low-impact physical, but high-impact emotional sport." What he means is that the sport asks almost nothing of your body and almost everything of your attention, and the release that comes with a clean hit is something people don't expect until they feel it. "If you have any tension or frustrations inside," he says, "this is the best way to get them released."
He's also taught people you wouldn't expect to see at an axe range. A young man born without hands, who was determined to throw — "we just had to find the right axe to suit." The Department for the Blind has brought groups in for outings. People in wheelchairs throw. Kids as young as four who can focus and follow directions can stick a hatchet. "If you want to do this," Scott says, "you will be able to do this. We are confident in that."
Scott's favorite customers are the people who did not expect to love it. The multi-generational family groups are his favorites — grandmothers down to great-grandkids, where the matriarch arrives convinced she'll watch from a chair and ends up, three turns in, planning their next visit.
It's a low-impact physical, but high-impact emotional sport. The core memories you make here are long-lasting and impactful.
The team that makes it work
Ironside's general manager is Shane Funk, who recently brought home the World Championship trophy in knives. Yes — the current world champion in a throwing discipline works at the place you can walk into on a Wednesday afternoon. Shane's title is part of a longer pattern: Ironside has sent throwers to every single World Axe Throwing League championship since 2018, hosted the U.S. Open in 2019 with ESPN broadcasting live from the venue, and runs more league seasons than any other venue in the league — three nights a week, five disciplines, plus marathon weekend leagues that cram a full season into a couple of days. On a busy stretch they've had a hundred people enrolled across the league nights.
Behind Shane is a full roster of coaches Scott has personally trained. Lisa says her biggest worry at the start of this whole thing was whether they could find people who could do what Scott does. "So far, it's been great. We've had a lot of great people." The Gardners lean heavily on their managers now, which is how a two-owner business keeps three league nights, a mobile throwing trailer, corporate bookings, morning networking, comedy nights, board game afternoons, Dungeons & Dragons sessions, monthly Irish jam sessions, and a pirate crew's home port all running at once.
The community keeps showing up
Morning Blend has grown from a dozen to 50+ Wednesday regulars.
That last sentence is not a joke. The Pirates of Central Iowa have officially declared Ironside their home port — they come in, sea shanties included. The local Dungeons & Dragons community meets here. A group of board-game regulars comes in who don't throw a single axe. Once a month, a live Irish jam session takes over a corner of the room. On Mondays, there's a comedy open mic that started because one of Ironside's coaches knew a guy in the scene and Scott said, "Let's give it a try." Quarterly, the whole place transforms into a mini Renaissance festival with vendors in period dress, themed music, and a decidedly more immersive atmosphere.
Then there's Morning Blend. What started as the merger of two older business-networking groups has grown, from about twelve people pre-COVID to fifty or sixty on a good Wednesday morning. It's free. There's no "one realtor per group" rule. Nobody's trying to lock you in. The people inside genuinely want each other to succeed, and a newcomer with no business and no pitch can still walk in, meet people, and leave with a lead on a job or an idea. "We're not looking to put anybody out of business," Scott says. "We are hoping people make connections that move them forward in their businesses." Lisa has noticed that the ones who stick around after the formal meeting ends, standing in pairs, still talking, are the real measure of a good Morning Blend.
Ironside also runs the axe, knife, and spear booths at Sleepy Hollow's Renaissance Faire each spring and fall. Ironside brings the full mobile throwing trailer to county fairs across the state, and hosts an annual tournament in late June. Family reunions show up. Wrestling teams and softball teams show up. Corporations with bylaws requiring quarterly team activities — John Deere, Corteva, and others — send their people here to connect with each other. This weekend, a Graceland University alumni group will fill the place for the day.
Occasionally, a family that has suffered a loss and is grieving wants to celebrate that life somewhere that feels alive. Ironside has become that place, too. It's one of the things Scott talks about most quietly and most seriously, that the room, for all its axes and mead-hall energy, has somehow become a place people choose when they need each other most.
What's next
The Gardners are candid about where they are. Like a lot of recreation businesses, they're rebuilding post-pandemic momentum. A lot of axe-throwing venues operate on five-year lease cycles and close when the lease ends; Ironside has outlasted most of them, and they plan to keep outlasting. Lisa's pitch is direct: "We need your support for the summer. Come see us. Come support us during the summer when we need it the most."
In the meantime, the vision is clear. Food service is coming within two or three months, which will change the equation for groups that currently arrive, throw, and leave hungry. The deck outside is now fully rigged with targets for warm-weather throwing — on a nice day, you can be outside with a hatchet in your hand in minutes. The long-term goal is to be so immersive that when somebody posts "what should I do in Des Moines?" on Reddit or LinkedIn, Ironside is one of the first five answers.
Scott wants the tavern feel to keep deepening — more custom touches, more moments where a guest does a double-take because they've stepped out of 2026 and into something older. Lisa wants corporate team building — already bigger for them than most people realize — to become the signature.
What they're really building, though, is the same thing they started with in 2018 — a third place. Lisa says, "we want to be the third place, that place that's not home and it's not work. The other place where you spend your free time." The one you go to when you need to feel welcomed and at ease, and walk out lighter than when you came in.
"When they leave, they feel good," Lisa says. "If you're throwing axes, you're leaving happy. If you're cheering people on, you're leaving happy. If you're connecting with others here, you're happy. This is just a happy place."
