The number of bars in the United States dedicated to showing women’s sports is expected to quadruple this year, from six at the start of 2025 to about two dozen by the end of the year.
Three women’s sports bars have opened so far this year, and 14 more are expected to join them in the coming months, according to an NBC News analysis. The venues have broken ground or plan to in every region of the country, including major cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco and smaller Midwestern cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Missouri.
Two of the venues had their grand openings this past week — Title 9 Sports Grill in Phoenix and 1972 Women’s Sports Pub in Austin, Texas — and another, Set the Bar in Omaha, Nebraska, will debut Friday night, right in time for the first round of the annual Women’s March Madness basketball tournament.
Molly Huyck, the owner of Set the Bar, said she was inspired to open her own space after she read about the United States’ first women’s sports bar, The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon, and visited another, Seattle’s Rough & Tumble. Those bars, which both opened in 2022, seemed a world apart from the typical sports bars she was accustomed to, she said.
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“The vibe that I feel when I go into other sports bars is it’s dark, it’s kind of a cement block, and you definitely have to ask to get women’s sports on and, for sure, to get the audio on women’s sports,” Huyck said, adding that she plans to dedicate the bar to her late sister Kelsey, who loved women's sports and died two years ago at 35. “I’m super excited to have a sports bar that feels good and a place where everyone’s welcome.”
The women’s sports bar boom coincides with a surge in interest in and viewership of women’s college and professional sports in recent years.
For example, in Nebraska, more than 92,000 fans filled Memorial Stadium in Lincoln in 2023 to see the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers volleyball team, who were five-time NCAA champions at the time, beat the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Mavericks, making it the largest crowd to witness a women’s sporting event.
The NCAA women’s basketball national championship game last year between South Carolina and Iowa was the most watched basketball game — including men’s, women’s, pro and college basketball — since 2019, with an estimated 18.9 million viewers. Many of those viewers were drawn to the sport by the media frenzy surrounding Iowa star Caitlin Clark, who has gone on to play for the Indiana Fever in the WNBA, which also had their most watched season last year and the highest attendance for games in more than two decades.
In addition to basketball, a slew of other women’s sports have also had spikes in viewers. A four-year, $240 million TV deal recently went into effect for the National Women’s Soccer League, whose total viewership increased 95% last year compared with the 2023 season. The Professional Women’s Hockey League launched in 2023 and reached more than 100,000 total YouTube subscribers and more than 40 million views over its first season. And last year, an average of more than 74 million viewers globally streamed a rematch between boxing greats Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano on Netflix, making it the most watched women’s sporting event in U.S. history.
Inspired by The Sports Bra
The Sports Bra, opened by Jenny Nguyen in April 2022, is thought to be the first women’s sports bar in the United States. It has become so well-known in Portland and across the country that Nguyen announced plans to franchise last year. Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit and the husband of tennis legend Serena Williams, pledged to help fund the expansion.
Deborah Pleva, the vice president of engagement for The Sports Bra, said that there are about eight steps to open a franchise location and that the bar is working with several prospective franchisees who are "quite far along in the process." However, the bar isn't quite ready to announce any new locations yet.
“There is a high level of interest in the brand, but we’re being very selective to be sure potential franchisees are aligned with our mission and 100% dedicated to women’s sports and fandom,” Pleva said.
NBC News spoke to six business owners who opened women’s sports bars recently or plan to open them this year. All of them, including Huyck, mentioned The Sports Bra as part of their inspiration.
Jax Diener, 58, said that she reached out to Nguyen in 2022, shortly after The Sports Bra opened, and asked about franchising the business but that Nguyen said she wasn’t ready for that yet.
Diener had dreamed of opening a sports bar for about 30 years by the time The Sports Bra opened. She said she would go to a sports bar in Marina del Rey, California, almost every Sunday for years to watch football.
“I left every Sunday saying, ‘I want to open my own sports bar someday,’ because I don’t want to feel the way I just felt in here for hours, like we spent so much money and so much time in that bar every Sunday only to feel like we weren’t smart enough by the gentleman that were in the bar,” Diener said. “We weren’t strategic enough. We don’t understand. We don’t know what we’re talking about and just feeling like it wasn’t for us.”
Diener said her dream of opening a bar wasn’t initially about women’s sports, even though she has long been a fan. Diener attended the first-ever WNBA game in June 1997 between the New York Liberty and the Los Angeles Sparks and was a Sparks season ticket holder for a decade. At first, she said, she just wanted an inclusive place where all people could watch sports “and feel just like anybody else watching sports on TV.”
Though Nguyen wasn’t ready to franchise back in 2022, Diener said she didn’t want to wait too long to open her dream bar, because she saw the surge in interest in women’s sports. She started the process of opening the bar and restaurant in September 2023 and aimed to open in time for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. She and her wife, Emme Eddy, opened Watch Me! in Long Beach, California, ahead of the opening ceremony in July — one day after they got their business license.
“Of course, everybody said to me: ‘There’s no way you can open a restaurant in under a year. There’s no way you’ll make it happen,’” Diener recalled. “And I said, ‘Watch me!’ And we’ve proved ourselves and our name over and over and over.”
Funding roadblocks and challenges
Though interest in women’s sports continues to increase, all of the women’s sports bar owners who spoke to NBC News said they had to crowdfund or dig into their savings to start their businesses.
Diener said she and her wife didn’t want to take out business loans, so they opened Watch Me! primarily using all of the funds they had saved for retirement. They raised about $27,000 through crowdfunding, but that wasn’t nearly enough, she said. Recently, she said, she has started applying for grants, and the bar is also diversifying its offerings — for example, by hosting trivia nights, “sip and paint” events and live music.
Monica Brady and Rachel Glenn plan to open The Dub in Kansas City, Missouri, later this year. They signed a lease on a space for the bar in September, and they’ve been working with the city to get their final permits to begin construction, which Glenn said will take about three months.
They hope to open by June 1 and are trying to raise $60,000 in the meantime, noting on their crowdfunding page that not meeting their goal could delay the bar’s opening. They’ve also been hosting pop-up events since June, selling T-shirts and other merchandise promoting the bar.
“Shockingly, banks don’t want to give loans to first-time bar owners — I say that tongue in cheek — especially women queer bar owners,” Brady said. “It has been a barrier to get a business loan, and I know that we’re not alone in that. I know that a lot of our peers opening in other cities have come up against the same exact situation, so that’s frustrating.”
Annie Weaver and Miranda Spencer, who opened The 99ers Sports Bar in Denver in December, are the bar’s only two employees. To pay off their loans as soon as possible, Spencer said, they both work day jobs, Weaver in insurance underwriting and Spencer in sales engineering, and then one or both of them work until the bar closes at 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends. Weaver said they struggled to find a space to lease because neither of them own businesses or homes that could be used as collateral. Their motto throughout the process has become “everything’s figure-out-able.”
“Five days before we signed our lease, I went to Miranda and I was like, ‘I’m done, I can’t do this anymore. We’ve been told no so many times,’” Weaver said. “And then five days later, we signed our lease. And now, looking back, I would have been so mad at myself that I backed out. This is the most incredible experience, and I can’t imagine it not being a part of my life.”
Huyck, who will open SET the Bar in Omaha on Friday, retired a year and a half ago after having worked for 21 years at PayPal and invested $250,000 of her own money into starting the business. She raised an additional $850,000 through investors, she said, and she has shared her investment model structure with other women’s sports bar owners. She always planned to use investors, she said, and opted to use her own money because of the additional hurdles a bank loan would have presented. She’ll be opening the bar debt-free.
'Where everyone knows your name'
Many of the bar owners not only wanted to avoid the macho attitudes they’ve encountered at traditional sports bars, but they also wanted to create more inclusive experiences for patrons by, for example, offering mocktails, local beers, craft cocktails and wine. Some of them said they intentionally created spaces with more light, as traditional sports bars can be dark, and Huyck said SET the Bar also has plants and bright colors.
Spencer said that whenever people walk in the door, she and Annie — and then, as a result, the other customers — will start clapping and sometimes “hollering.” Spencer said she enjoys reading the bar’s Google reviews, and a recent one described it as “the bar where everyone knows your name.”
All of the bar owners said they want to ensure that everyone feels welcome, particularly the LGBTQ community, which most of the owners are a part of.
“We are a married couple, and people can connect the dots and see that this is lesbian-owned, and we’re proud of that, but we don’t lead with that,” Diener said, adding that the bar is open to everyone, including families with kids. “We lead with this — celebrating women’s sports — and that’s what separates us from other queer bars out there.”
Weaver said that she doesn’t think it’s an accident that many of the owners of women’s sports bars are part of the LGBTQ community.
“We didn’t have spaces where we felt safe or like we could be ourselves growing up,” Weaver said. “I don’t think that’s random. I think it makes sense to me why it is the way it is, but we still want to be inclusive to everybody.”
The moments that many of the bar owners said they look forward to are when their bars are standing-room-only during important games. In January, just a month after The 99ers Sports Bar opened, the Professional Women’s Hockey League played a game in Denver, with more than 14,000 fans in the arena, setting a record for the highest attendance at a professional women’s hockey game in the United States. Weaver said people in the crowd held signs that said “After party at the 99ers.” Customers filled the bar, and then a line formed outside despite the cold weather.
“We need more of these,” Weaver said of the bars. “We need them all over the United States. They need to exist everywhere. Everybody deserves to have a space like this.”
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