The view outside Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar in San Francisco’s Castro district
Women’s sports bars are scoring big gains in 2025, with plans in the works that will quadruple their numbers by the end of the year.
That’s according to an NBC News analysis which cites three new bars already opened this year, with 14 more expected to add to the frenzy. Those include venues in every region of the country, with openings planned for New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and smaller cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Missouri.
Related:
As Women’s March Madness kicks off, two venues just opened in Phoenix (Title 9 Sports Grill) and Austin (1972 Women’s Sports Pub). A third, Set the Bar, debuts with the Women’s Sweet 16 this Friday night in Omaha.
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At the 99ers Sports Bar in Denver, just opened in December, customers packed the bar in the Mile High City the same night the Professional Women’s Hockey League broke an all-time attendance record at the city’s arena for a professional women’s hockey game in the United States. Attendees held signs that read “After party at the 99ers” and a line soon formed down the block outside the bar despite the frigid Colorado weather.
It’s one more indication of the burst in popularity of women’s sports in the United States and a rush by prospective bar owners to meet fans’ demand for welcoming spaces to watch them.
“I’m super excited to have a sports bar that feels good and a place where everyone’s welcome,” said Set the Bar’s owner Molly Huyck. “You definitely have to ask to get women’s sports on and, for sure, to get the audio on women’s sports” in other sports bars in Omaha.
Huge gains in viewership have been logged by women’s basketball, hockey, soccer, and even boxing, over the last several years; in 2024, more than 74 million viewers streamed a rematch between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano on Netflix, making it the most watched women’s sporting event in U.S. history.
Last year, the NCAA women’s basketball national championship game between South Carolina and Iowa was the most watched basketball game since 2019, surpassing the viewership of every other men’s, women’s, pro, and college basketball face-off.
Iowa star Caitlin Clark carried that enthusiasm to the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, which had their most-watched season last year and the highest attendance for games in more than two decades.
Maybe the largest gain in popularity accompanied a four-year, $240 million television rights deal with National Women’s Soccer League: their total viewership increased a whopping 95% in 2024 compared to the previous season.
Several new bar owners said those numbers and the example of the country’s very first bar devoted to women’s sports inspired their decision to jump into business.
In 2022, Jenny Nguyen, a chef and entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon, came up with what’s turned out to be a million-dollar idea: the Sports Bra. The popular Grant Park venue became such a success that Nguyen is now franchising the model.
“I thought about if I came into a place like the Sports Bra when I was younger, when I was seven or nine or 13,” Nguyen told LGBTQ Nation in 2023. “And then I realized that I had never been in a place where I felt seen, felt fully represented — how that would impact me and how much that would mean to me as a kid? All of those things really triggered something in me that was like, ‘Okay, I don’t have a choice anymore.’”
Love of women’s sports is at the center of Nguyen’s concept.
“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,” said Jax Diener, co-owner of the bar Watch Me! in Long Beach, California, open since last summer. “We lead with this — celebrating women’s sports — and that’s what separates us from other queer bars out there.”
In San Francisco, Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar is set to open in May with the arrival of the city’s new WNBA franchise The Valkyries.
“We met playing soccer,” Danielle Thoe, co-owner along with business partner Sara Yergovich, told LGBTQ Nation recently. “We want our teammates to come after games and hang out, whether there’s something on to watch or not. And as long as they support women’s sports, we welcome everyone.”
“We need more of these,” said Annie Weaver, co-owner of 99ers Sports Bar, where fans lined up after that record-breaking hockey game in Denver.
“We need them all over the United States,” she said. “They need to exist everywhere. Everybody deserves to have a space like this.”
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