Oregon’s Sports Bra, a pub for women’s sports fans, plans national expansion as interest booms
PORTLAND, Ore. — On a recent weeknight at this northeast Portland bar, fans drank pins and burgers as college women’s lacrosse and beach volleyball games played on big screen TVs. Memorabilia signed by female athletes hung on the walls, with a painting of American soccer legend Abby Wambach above the beer list on the chalkboard.
The Sports Bra is a pub that celebrates women’s sport – and the only one that’s on TV.
The bar is buzzing with activity and has successfully capitalized on a rapid rise in interest in women’s sports, most recently epitomized by the frenzy over basketball phenom Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking exploits at the University of Iowa.
Just two years after opening, the bar this week announced plans to operate nationally through a franchise model.
“Things happened in no time compared to my prediction,” founder and CEO Jenny Nguyen told The Associated Press. “This little place I built for my friends and me to watch games and give female athletes their flowers means so much more. And not just for me, but for many people.”
Under the plan, bars and entrepreneurs elsewhere can apply to use the Sports Bra brand for their franchises. Nguyen is open to working with people who already have a physical space, but also with people who may only have a business plan. What matters, she said, is that the potential future partners share The Sports Bra’s values.
One aspiring partner is Jackie Reau, who hopes to open a franchise in Cincinnati, where she works as CEO of a media and marketing agency. During an interview at The Sports Bra, where she enjoyed watching her college women’s lacrosse team on one of the TV sets, she said such establishments “celebrate women’s sports and the champions and the athletes behind the story.”
“It’s exciting to see it grow and become so popular,” Reau said of the bar. “Now is exactly such a moment for women’s sports.”
The expansion will be fueled by funding from a foundation created by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams. Nguyen said she has already received hundreds of inquiries.
Interest in women’s sports is at an all-time high, helped by Clark’s performance this year, when she broke all NCAA scoring records for women and men. The April 7 championship game between Iowa and South Carolina averaged 18.9 million viewers, surpassing the audience for the men’s title game for the first time.
A week later, an average of 2.45 million viewers tuned in to the WNBA draft to watch Clark go to the Indiana Fever as the No. 1 pick. This week it was reported that she was close to signing a $28 million deal with Nike, which would be the richest sponsorship deal for a women’s basketball player.
The increasing interest applies not only to women’s basketball, but also to other sports. The 2023 Women’s World Cup reported record attendances with almost 2 million fans. A University of Nebraska volleyball match played in a football stadium last August drew more than 92,000 people, a world record for the largest attendance at a women’s sporting event.
“It’s kind of a pinnacle moment where eyeballs are in abundance,” said Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon. “It’s just a combination of a lot of things that has created this incredible moment for women’s sports that seems to be more than just a flash in the pan.”
As the fan base and engagement grows, so does the push to change the sports bar culture that has traditionally focused on men’s athletics. Other establishments like The Sports Bra have recently opened elsewhere: A Bar of Their Own opened earlier this year in Minneapolis and Seattle’s Rough & Tumble launched at the end of 2022.
Sports bars haven’t always been welcoming spaces for women, Nguyen said. A fan since childhood, she would gather groups of friends to go because she didn’t feel safe going alone. She recalled encountering macho environments that made her feel uncomfortable, and bartenders who refused to change the channel to a women’s game.
“That was exactly what we agreed to,” she said. “When I wanted to take a step back and shake up the status quo a little bit, I started to really dig into how the sports bra could matter and change the narrative about sports bars.”
One memory of Nguyen from her time as an owner especially stands out: Serena Williams’ last match, in 2022. A huge crowd came to watch, spilling onto the sidewalk. People outside held their hands close to their eyes as they peered through windows to see the screens.
“If Serena scored a point, I swear to God, I thought the glass would shatter. My eyeballs were rattling in my head,” said Nguyen. “And when they were playing volleyball, I felt like you could hear a hamburger spinning in the kitchen.”
Towards the end she felt tears welling up. She passed around two boxes of tissues to equally tearful customers as everyone enjoyed Williams’ final minutes on the field.
“I remember taking a deep breath and thinking, ‘I don’t know if there’s one place on the planet that’s experiencing this exact moment,’” Nguyen said. “It was amazing.”
Fans may still find it challenging to watch women’s sports games because many of them are not broadcast on TV and require different streaming subscriptions, said Tarlan Chahardovali, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Sports and Entertainment Management.
Women’s sports bars can be a reliable destination for many events if you have those memberships. But more broadly, Chahardovali says there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that the media market does not underestimate women’s sport.
“Today’s numbers are hard to ignore, and I think it’s a very exciting time,” she said. “But it is a moment that needs to be maintained and sustained and invested in continuously.”