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By Claire Rush / AP, PORTLAND, Oregon
On a recent weeknight at a bar in Northeast Portland, Oregon, fans downed bingers and burgers as college women's lacrosse and beach volleyball games played on big-screen televisions. Autographed memorabilia from female athletes lined the walls, with a painting of American football legend Abby Wambach placed above the chalkboard beer menu.
At Sports Bra, women's sports are celebrated — and it's the only thing on TV.
Busy and bustling, the bar has seen a meteoric rise in interest in women's sports, epitomized most recently by the frenzy over University of Iowa basketball phenomenon Caitlin Clark's record-breaking exploits.
Photo: AP
Just two years after opening, the bar this week announced plans to roll out nationally through a franchise model.
“Things happened at the speed of light compared to my prediction,” said founder and CEO Jenny Nguyen. “This little spot that I built for my friends and I to watch games and give the athletes their flowers means so much more, and not just to me, but to a lot of people.”
Under the plan, bars and entrepreneurs will be able to apply to use The Sports Bra brand for their franchises. Nguyen is open to working with people who already have a physical space, as well as people who may only have a business plan.
Photo: AP
What matters is that potential future partners share The Sports Bra's values, he said.
One prospective partner is Jackie Reau, who hopes to open a franchise in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she works as the CEO of a media and marketing company.
During an interview with The Sports Bra, where she happily watched her college's women's lacrosse team on one of the televisions, she said such institutions “celebrate women's sports and the champions and athletes behind the history.”
“It's exciting to see it grow and gain such popularity,” Reau said of the bar. “It's such a moment right now for women's sport.”
The expansion will be bolstered by funding from a foundation created by Reddit Inc 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 feats this year, when she broke the all-time US National Collegiate Athletic Association records for women and men. The championship game between Iowa and the University of South Carolina on April 7 averaged 18.9 million viewers, surpassing the audience for the men's title game for the first time.
A week later, a record 2.45 million average viewers tuned in to the WNBA draft to watch Clark go to the Indiana Fever as the No. 1 pick. It was reported this week that she was set to sign a $28 million deal with Nike Inc that would be the richest endorsement deal for a female basketball player.
The increase in interest is not only about women's basketball, but other sports as well. Last year's FIFA Women's World Cup recorded a record attendance of nearly 2 million fans. A University of Nebraska volleyball game played on a football field drew more than 92,000 people last August, a world record for the largest attendance at a women's sporting event.
“It's kind of in this prime time where eyeballs are plentiful,” said Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon. “It was just an alignment of a lot of things that created this incredible moment for women's sports that seems to be more than just a blip.”
As the fan base and engagement grows, so does the appetite to change the sports bar culture that has traditionally catered to men's athletics. Other establishments like The Sports Bra have recently opened elsewhere: A Bar of Their Own opened in Minneapolis earlier this year, and Seattle's Rough & Tumble opened in late 2022.
Sports bars haven't always been welcoming spaces for women, Nguyen said.
A fan since she was little, she used to gather groups to go because she didn't feel safe going alone. She recalled encountering macho environments that made her uncomfortable and bartenders who refused to change the channel to a women's game.
“That's exactly what we agreed to,” he said. “When I wanted to push back and disrupt the status quo, that's when I really started looking at how the Sports Bra could matter and change the narrative in sports bars.”
One memory in particular stands out for Nguyen from her time as owner: Serena Williams' final match in 2022. A huge crowd showed up to watch, spilling onto the sidewalk. People outside covered their eyes with their hands as they peered through the windows to see the displays.
“When Serena scored a point, I swear to God, I thought the glass was going to break. My eyeballs were rattling inside my head,” Nguyen said. “And then when they played volleyball, I feel like you can hear a burger flipping in the kitchen.”
Towards the end he felt tears welling up. He passed out two tissues for similarly tearful customers as everyone enjoyed Williams' final minutes on court.
“I remember taking a deep breath and thinking, 'I don't know if there's a place on the face of the planet that's going through this right now,'” Nguyen said. “Was amazing.”
Fans still struggle to watch women's sports games because many are not televised and require different streaming subscriptions, said Tarlan Chahardovali, an assistant professor in the University of South Carolina's Department of Sport and Entertainment Management.
Women's sports bars can be a credible outlet for many events by having these memberships, but overall, a lot of work remains to be done to ensure the media market doesn't devalue women's sports, Chahardovali said.
“Today's numbers are hard to ignore and I think it's a very exciting time,” he said. “But it's a moment that needs to be preserved and preserved, and it needs continued investment.”
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