12. Women’s Sports Bars

We will see Notre Dame sitting in this zone a lot, and they're going to have to contest shooters, and they will look to bring a couple players to McCowan if they can on the catch. In April of 2018, Jenny Nguyen got together as some friends to watch the NCAA Women's Basketball Championship at a local sports bar. And we will see Mrs. Ify State playing in the deny. These two teams, each of the last two years, defeated Connecticut to get to the National Championship game.

But when they got to the bar, the game was nowhere to be found. We roll in there and there's like 30 plus TVs. The game's not on any TV. On the projector, there's a regular season baseball game and there's like one table of guys watching it. She convinced a server to put the game on one of the smaller TVs and watched with her friends up until the dramatic end.

I think there was like 3.2 seconds left or something, and Areké Agumboale gets the basketball at the 3-point line on an in-bounds play, takes one dribble and launches it, and the buzzer goes off. And the ball goes through the net. And I swear to you, we lost our minds. No one else knew why. Everybody in the bar was staring at us because nobody was watching the same game we were.

In the parking lot after the game, when couldn't shake the feeling that the experience could have been better. I hug a good friend of mine. I was like, that's the best game I've ever seen in my entire life. And she goes, yeah, can you imagine if the sound had been on? I said, the only way we're ever going to watch a women's game in its full glory is if we had our own place.

That thought sent wind on a mission to create something America had never seen. A sports bar that plays only women's sports. And as it turns out, there's a pretty strong financial case for doing it. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, women's sports bars.

From a young age, Jenny Nguyen was obsessed with basketball. I loved everything about it, the physicality, the beauty in the motion, the pace of it. Basketball was really my identity. She dreamed of playing professionally, but her parents wanted her to follow a more traditional path.

My parents fled Vietnam during the war in 75. Mom was a bank teller for many, many years. And then dad was a janitor. My mom was like, you know, girls don't play sports.

Later, Wing discovered a second obsession, cooking. I called my parents and told them that I wanted to be a chef. My dad, he gave me the best advice I think anyone could have given me. And I think he did it more to like scare me out of it. He goes, Jenny, I want you to find the worst job in that field that you can find, do it for a year. And if after that, you still want that to be your life, then go for it.

When took that advice and landed a job as a fry cook at a fast casual restaurant chain, the kitchen she found was kind of like playing a sport. I'm instantly hooked, the adrenaline rush, the being part of a team, timing, execution, being under a crunch. I thrived. So a year went by real quickly. And much to my dad's dismay, I was like, I love it.

She went on to graduate from culinary school. Then, over the next 15 years, she embarked on a successful career as an executive chef for Fortune 500 companies and universities. She was still a sports nut, especially when it came to women's basketball.

But finding those games wasn't easy. I think that the experience for the women's sports fan is universal in a lot of ways. The inability to find a place to watch it, the ability to find it at all on TV, you know a game is on on Thursday night and you look it up on the internet and you can't find it.

I've had this experience as well, going to Nubar, just trying to watch the women's game. And, you know, it's a struggle. Oh, well, you know, we can't change the channel because, you know, everyone's watching this game. That's Cheryl Cookie. She's a professor at Purdue University, where she studies gender and sports.

She's been tracking TV coverage of women's sports for 30 years. And she says that the sports bar issue is just part of the challenge that fans face. In 1989, when we were first collecting data, the percentage of coverage of women's sports was around 5%. In 2019, we were at 5.1% on the local affiliates in 5.7% on ESPN Sports Center.

You don't have to really try to be a fan of men's sports. Our culture makes it really easy. It's like the air we breathe. Even if you're not a sports fan, you know when the Super Bowl is happening, right? You know when the NFL football season starts. It's constantly there, whereas as a fan of women's sports,

You really have to invest. You really have to dig deep and know, okay, where do I go if I want to watch this match? That's what Win was thinking about back in 2018, watching the Women's NCAA Championship game without sound. I was driving home that night and I was just like, you know, if we had our own place, what we call it? That was just like, I had the sports bra. And then a few days after that, I was like, ooh, I have a motto for it. We support women.

The idea of the sports bra became a running joke among women's friends, an imaginary place where women's sports were always front and center. Like if we wanted to watch the championship of gymnastics, nobody would put that on. And we'd be like, oh, the sports bra gymnastics would be on. My friends and I would just, you know, have this make-believe land that was like perfect.

In 2020, Nguyen decided it was time to turn make-believe into reality. She applied for loans to get the business off the ground. But this was at the peak of the pandemic when bars were going out of business left and right.

These banks would always say, there's three main reasons we can't do this. One, you've never owned a business before, so you're completely inexperienced. Two, it's the pandemic and you want to open a bar and restaurant during a pandemic. And then three, this is literally a concept nobody had ever done before, which is very, very risky for a bank.

Every single bank turned her down. So she cashed out her life savings, around $27,000, and cobbled together some more money from family and friends. And then she launched a Kickstarter campaign. That's when she knew her idea had struck a chord. We reached our goal of 49,000 in nine days. And by the time it closed 30 days later, it was over 105,000. I've got thousands of responses.

I got notes, letters, cards, things in the mail. For Winn, it was a sign that she had tapped into something special. People were ready to show up. But finding the games to put on the TVs, well, that turned out to be the real challenge. That's coming up.

The Sports Bra opened for business in Northeast Portland on April 1, 2022. It was the first day of the NCAA Women's Final Four. Jenny Nguyen had always been told that she'd need to be patient, but it takes time for a bar to build a base of loyal customers.

But at the sports bra, we opened to absolute media frenzy. There was hundreds and hundreds of people out front hours before we opened. I semi-blocked out that day because there was just so many feelings.

The sports bra looks pretty similar to any other sports bar. It's an intimate space with 5 TVs, 40 seats, and lots of dark wood. The walls are covered with sports memorabilia. There are 21 beers on tap, all from breweries owned at least in part by women.

But according to Professor Cheryl Cookie, the sports bra is about more than just sports and beer. As a woman in this culture, there's a song and dance that I have to do just to go and watch a game. Like, okay, who are we? Where are we going to sit?

The sports bra is unlike anything that I've experienced as a woman. It's unlike anything that I've experienced as a sports fan. It is a space that is explicitly about women's sports in an unapologetic way.

Cookie says the sports bra has had to fight back against a common narrative she's encountered in her work. That people aren't interested in women's sports. That the women's game is not as exciting. It's not as interesting. People just don't want to tune in. I think the idea that the demand or interest isn't there is now being challenged by empirical evidence.

The audience is there. It's just the content isn't always easily accessible in the kinds of ways I think that men's sports are. If you make it easy for people to watch, they'll watch. There's evidence to back that up. In a 2018 poll by Nielsen, 84% of general sports fans, women and men alike, said they were interested in watching women's sports.

This past spring, the NCAA Women's Basketball Final was aired on network television for the first time in 28 years, and it attracted a record-setting 9.9 million viewers, about two-thirds the audience of the men's final. It was also the most viewed college sporting event on ESPN's streaming platform.

And yet the ability to get content is really a struggle. You can't just leave ESPN on or Fox Sports. It takes a lot of investment and effort. It's getting multiple subscriptions to multiple different platforms to try to fill in the gaps and put all the pieces together.

Luckily for win, there was a growing number of media companies focused on fulfilling this need. Networks and streaming platforms like Just Women Sports, The Women Sports Network, and ESPNW now feature around-the-clock coverage of more than a dozen sports. Major cable providers generally charge by the number of seats and the number of TVs at a sports bar. For a 40-seat sports bar, the bill can easily run over $2,000 per month.

Wind says the cost of utilities, which includes subscriptions and cable services, accounts for more than 50% of her expenses. We've played, I mean, obviously the big ones, so soccer, basketball, tennis, softball, volleyball. We've done swimming, diving, gymnastics, cheer, pickleball, bowling, rugby, lacrosse, boxing, crossfit,

Ultimate Frisbee, Roller Derby, the Special Olympics, we dedicated a TV to that. And it's not just women who are tuning in. A lot of the guys that come into the sports bra on the regular don't watch men's sports anymore, period. A lot of the men's sports to them have gotten so convoluted with drama, ego, selfish play, whereas in a lot of women's sports, it's much more like classic fundamentals and team oriented.

Customers like this have been a boon for win. In the first year of business, the sports bra brought in over $1 million in revenue, three times the earnings of the average bar in America. It has been profitable since that very first day. I paid off all the loans that I told people would take me five years to pay them. And then I was able to pay myself from day one, which a lot of owners don't for years.

Of course, when has the benefit of operating in Portland, which is known to be a progressive town? But she thinks the model can work anywhere. There's been people all up in my email about investing in a franchise, investing in the spread of the sports bra as far and wide as humanly possible.

Recently, another bar focused on women's sports open in Seattle. It also plays men's sports some of the time, but win is still encouraged. If other sports bars that are traditionally just playing men's sports decide that, oh, we're going to have a women's Wednesday where all the TVs are just playing women's sports. Oh my God, that would be a W.

The mission of the sports bra is to increase visibility representation and the culture of fandom for girls and women sports, period.

Part of that mission includes exposing girls to women's sports at a young age. The sports bra allows customers of all ages to watch games before 10 p.m. And for when that kind of access is personal. I started to think about if I was nine years old and my parents took me to a place like the sports bra, what kind of an impact that would have had on my life.

to be in a place that felt like I belonged. I thought about a little kid that could see a future for themselves represented on TV and then look around and be surrounded by people cheering for that person up there on the screen. All we're doing is changing the channel and it kind of changes everything. And wins parents, they are regulars now too.

Mom is there every day, Dad's there about twice a week, wants to kind of like fiddle with things, and then wants to eat and drink and watch sports. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Kraten. This episode was produced by Sarah Lily, with help from Lyric Foutich and mixed by Jeremy Johnston.

Do you ever have like an old school sports bar guy wandering and say, what the hell's going on here? Where's my baseball game? Absolutely. And they sit down in there like this is rad. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.