US pub plans national expansion as interest grows for female sports fans

On a recent weeknight at this bar in Northeast Portland, fans stopped by for pints and burgers as college women’s lacrosse and beach volleyball matches played on big-screen TVs. Memorabilia signed by female athletes lined the walls, with a painting of American football legend Abby Wambach hanging above a chalkboard beer menu.

Sports Bra is a pub that celebrates women’s sports–and the only thing on TV.

Full and buzzing with activity, the bar has successfully harnessed the tremendous growth of interest in women’s sports, most recently embodied in the frenzy over the record-breaking exploits of University of Iowa basketball phenom Caitlin Clark.

Just two years after opening, the bar announced plans this week to go nationwide through a franchise model.

“Things have happened at a lighter pace than I anticipated,” founder and CEO Jenny Nguyen told The Associated Press. “This little space that we created for me and my friends to watch the game and give the female athletes their flowers means so much. And not just for me, but for many people.”

Under the scheme, bars and entrepreneurs elsewhere will be able to apply to use the sports bra brand for their franchises. Nguyen is willing to work with people who already have a physical space, as well as those who only have a business plan. What matters, he said, is that potential future partners share Sports Bra’s values.

An ambitious partner is Jackie Reau, who hopes to open a franchise in Cincinnati, where she works as the CEO of a media and marketing agency. During an interview in The Sports Bra, where she happily watched her college women’s lacrosse team on a TV set, she said that such establishments “celebrate the champions and athletes behind women’s sports and the story.”

“It’s exciting to see it grow and gain so much popularity,” Reau said of the bar. “It’s such a moment right now 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 he has already received hundreds of inquiries.

Interest in the women’s game is at an all-time high, helped by Clark’s exploits this year, when she broke all NCAA scoring records for women and men. The championship game between Iowa and South Carolina on April 7 drew an average of 18.9 million viewers, surpassing the audience for the men’s title match for the first time.

A record 2.45 million viewers averaged the WNBA Draft a week later to watch as Clark went 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 that would be the richest sponsorship contract for a female basketball player.

The increase in interest is not just for women’s basketball, but for other sports as well. The 2023 Women’s World Cup saw a record attendance of nearly 2 million fans. More than 92,000 people attended a University of Nebraska volleyball game played in a football stadium last August, a world record for the largest attendance at a women’s sporting event.

“It’s like this extreme moment where eyeballs are abundant,” said Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon. “It’s simply an alignment of many things that have created this incredible moment for the women’s game that appears to be much more than just a flash in the pan.”

As the fan base and engagement grows, so does the appetite to change the sports bar culture that traditionally caters to men’s athletics. Other establishments like The Sports Bra have recently opened elsewhere: A Bar of Their Own began operations in Minneapolis earlier this year, and Seattle’s Rough & Tumble launches in late 2022.

Sports bars haven’t always been welcoming places for women, Nguyen said. A fan since childhood, she would gather groups of friends to go because she did not feel safe going alone. She remembered encountering a masculine atmosphere that made her uncomfortable, and bartenders refusing to change the channel for women’s sports.

“That’s all we decided,” she said. “When I wanted to step back and overturn the status quo, that’s when I really started paying attention to how sports bras could matter and sports bars. But the story may change.”

One memory in particular for Nguyen is from her time as owner: Serena Williams’ last match in 2022. A huge crowd had gathered on the footpath to watch. People outside would cover their eyes with their hands while peeping through the windows to see the screen.

“When Serena would score a point, I swear to God, I felt like glass was going to break. “My eyes were rolling into my head,” Nguyen said. “And then when they were volleying, I felt like you could hear burgers being flipped in the kitchen.”

Finally, he felt tears start flowing from his eyes. She passed two tissue boxes to crying customers as everyone enjoyed Williams’ final moments on the court.

“I remember taking a deep breath and thinking, ‘I don’t know if there’s a single place on the planet where this exact moment is happening,'” Nguyen said. “It was amazing.”

Tarlan Chahardovli, an assistant professor in the department of sport and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina, said fans may still find it challenging to watch women’s games, because many are not televised and require separate streaming subscriptions.

With those memberships, women’s sports bars can be a reliable option for many events. But more broadly, Chahardovli said, there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure the media market does not undervalue women’s sports.

“It’s hard to ignore today’s numbers and I think these are very exciting times,” he said. “But this is a moment that needs to be captured and sustained, and it requires continued investment.”