PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)– On a current weeknight at this bar in northeast Portland, fans downed pints and hamburgers as college ladies’s lacrosse and beach volley ball matches used big-screen TVs. Souvenirs signed by female professional athletes covered the walls, with a painting of U.S. soccer legend Abby Wambach installed above the blackboard beer menu.
The Sports Bra is a club where ladies’s sports are commemorated– and the only thing on television.
Loaded and buzzing with activity, the bar has actually effectively taken advantage of a meteoric increase of interest in ladies’s sports, embodied most just recently by the craze over University of Iowa basketball phenomenon Caitlin Clark’s records-smashing tasks.
Simply 2 years after opening, the bar revealed strategies today to go nationwide through a franchise design.
The Sports Bra creator and CEO Jenny Nguyen positions for an image at the sports bar on Thursday, April 25, 2024, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
The Sports Bra creator and CEO Jenny Nguyen chuckles throughout an interview with the Associated Press at the sports bar on Thursday, April 25, 2024, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
“Things have actually taken place at light speed compared to what my projection was,” creator and CEO Jenny Nguyen informed The Associated Press. “This small area that I constructed for my good friends and I to enjoy video games and offer female professional athletes their flowers suggests a lot more. And not simply to me, however to a great deal of individuals.”
Under the strategy, bars and business owners somewhere else will have the ability to use to utilize The Sports Bra brand name for their franchises. Nguyen is open to dealing with individuals who currently have a physical area, in addition to those who might just have a company strategy. What matters, she stated, is that the possible future partners share The Sports Bra’s worths.
One aiming partner is Jackie Reau, who wants to open a franchise in Cincinnati, where she works as the CEO of a media and marketing company. Throughout an interview at The Sports Bra, where she gladly viewed her college ladies’s lacrosse group on among the television sets, she stated such facilities “commemorate ladies’s sports and the champs and the professional athletes behind the story.”
Jackie Reau speaks throughout an interview with the Associated Press at The Sports Bra sports bar on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
As a Caitlin Clark jersey is shown in the background, consumers consume and enjoy college ladies’s lacrosse and beach volley ball matches at The Sports Bra sports bar on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
“It’s interesting to see it grow and acquire such appeal,” Reau stated of the bar. “It’s simply such a minute today for females’s sports.”
The growth will be enhanced by moneying from a structure produced by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is wed to tennis legend Serena Williams.