How the Nation's First Women's Sports Bar Kicked Off a Movement

(a lengthy, but most enlightening read for anyone interested in women's sports and gender equality)

Although I have no interest in sports, if there were such a bar here, it would have at least a bit of my custom!)


How the Nation’s First Women’s Sports Bar Kicked Off a Movement
PUBLISHED 7/30/2024 by Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

When Jenny Nguyen opened The Sports Bra in 2022, she started a movement: Bars that only show women’s sports. Now, fandom and pay are rapidly growing—and it’s time for the Olympics.


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(Christine Dong / The 19th)

This article was originally published by The 19th.

The place was empty except for Jenny Nguyen and the cable guy, who had just finished hooking up the two TVs. Soon, this small room in Portland, Oregon, would be the nation’s first women’s sports bar. It would rarely know quiet like this again. Nguyen flicked through the TV schedule and found two college women’s basketball games. She put one on each screen, and settled into a brown leather booth across from their twin glows. It didn’t take long for the tears to come.

Nguyen, a former chef, had been playing with the idea of opening a bar dedicated to women’s sports since 2018. But she considered herself risk averse and pretty unambitious. She’d been unemployed for five years. And yet, once the idea took hold, she couldn’t quite shake it. One night in 2021, she had been talking to a woman she was dating who, like Nguyen, had played basketball. (Nguyen played through high school until she tore her ACL at 19.) They envisioned a bar where the TVs only played women’s sports and no one batted an eye. It would be a place for families. How cool it would have been, they thought, to have had a place like that when they were kids or teenagers? What about now, in their 40s? “We both realized that a space like that didn’t exist for us. When I thought about the young me, I thought, ‘God, if we can get one kid in here that could feel represented and feel like there’s a future for them in sports, even if that one kid had that moment, it would be worth it,’” Nguyen said.

When Nguyen launched a Kickstarter campaign for the bar in February 2022, it was fully funded within nine days, ultimately racking up more than $105,000 from 600-plus donors. She found a spot in Portland’s Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhood next to a music shop. Inside, a bar ran along one end of the room and leather benches along the other. A basketball net chandelier hangs near a chalkboard menu listing 21 taps, all beers either made by women or at breweries owned or operated by women. Nguyen crafted a sophisticated bar menu (“Aunt Tina’s Vietna-wings,” a Vietnamese take on chicken wings, and a tempeh Reuben are on offer) and a cheeky cocktail list. The Title IX, one of their signature cocktails, is a mix of bourbon, peach liqueur and mint. Around the entire room: scores of memorabilia—almost all donated—that pay homage to local and national teams. One of Nguyen’s favorites: a quilt of the iconic moment in 1999 when, after her penalty kick clinched the World Cup for the United States, Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt and knelt on the turf in her sports bra. When “The Sports Bra” popped into Nguyen’s head, she was sure it was the name for her bar, even when people pushed back saying it was, somehow, too risqué. She just thought about it differently. “I wouldn’t change much of what a sports bar is, but I would just change the channel on the TV. So I just took ‘sports bar’ and I switched the two letters,” she said. “The key is: The tiny changes make the biggest difference.”

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(Christine Dong / The 19th)

The Bra opened in April 2022, a 40-seat museum to women’s sports greatness. The front door is plastered with a mural of women athletes. Practically every available surface is lined with autographed jerseys, trophies, cleats and balls. WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert signed the wall. On opening day, lines were out the door. The Bra hit nearly $1 million in revenue in just eight months—a lightning-fast streak to profitability, especially for the hospitality industry. The bar’s success has been so monumental that it helped Portland win its bid to host the Women’s Final Four in 2030. Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden used it as the venue to pitch Engelbert on expanding the WNBA to Portland. The Bra and Rough and Tumble, a women’s sports bar that opened in late 2022 in Seattle, have inspired the launch of similar bars in Long Beach, New York City, Minneapolis, Austin, Kansas City, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Denver. There’s at least one group chat for owners who are starting out.
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(Christine Dong / The 19th)

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(Christine Dong / The 19th)

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(Christine Dong / The 19th)


https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/30/womens-sports-bar-bra/