Inside the Bar Dedicated Entirely to Women’s Sports

The win would have been better with some volume. Jenny Nguyen was drinking pitchers of Fat Tire with friends at a Portland bar, and watching the 2018 women’s basketball championship game on mute on a small TV in the corner. When Notre Dame scored a three pointer against Mississippi to break a tie in the final seconds, they all jumped up and started screaming. The rest of the bar stared at them, confused.

By then, Nguyen had become accustomed to watching women’s basketball without sound. She joked to the group that the only way they would be able to enjoy a game at a bar, is if they opened their own. “I was like, ‘If anybody’s going to give it a shot, I’m going to give it a shot,’” Nguyen tells ELLE. It took four years and a lot of hard work, but she turned that dream into a reality. In 2022, Nguyen opened one of the only bars in the world devoted entirely to women’s sports.

The Sports Bra is more than just a bar. It’s a shrine to female athletes, a safe space for the queer community, and a brick-and-mortar beacon of the ongoing fight for gender equity in the sports world. “The timing of the Bra… could not have been more perfect,” Nguyen says. “Right now is the beginning—not of a peak, but of an upward trajectory [in women’s sports] that’s not going to slow down any time soon.”

Women’s wins are becoming louder than ever.

At the Sports Bra, walls are filled with photos of Serena Williams, Sue Bird, and Allyson Felix. Signature drinks have names like Title IX and GOAT. And five enormous TVs play women’s sports, all the time. Regulars come for the tight-knit, sports-obsessed community, and stay for the local craft beer. Everything on tap comes from female-owned breweries. The menu features nachos, vegan burgers, and wings with a Vietnamese glaze—an ode to Nguyen’s heritage.

Her father, Tuong Nguyen, fled Vietnam after the war in 1976 at age 17, by secretly boarding a fishing boat with eleven other teenagers and young adults. The group drifted for days on the South China Sea, before the boat sprang a leak and they flagged down some Thai fishermen who led them ashore. After spending time in a Thai refugee camp, Tuong eventually arrived in Minnesota, where he met Nguyen’s mother, Thu, who left Vietnam one year earlier at the age of 18. Thu’s father had been a colonel in the Vietnamese army.

Tuong and Thu got married in 1979, and moved to Portland where Tuong’s brother lived. At the hospital for the birth of their daughter, Thu scrolled through an American baby name book. “I told my husband, ‘We don’t know any American names, but in this book I think Jennifer sounds like a really beautiful [name],’” she says. “I didn’t want her to be so different… I wanted her to be like all the Americans in the country.”

Nguyen grew up in the predominantly white city of Portland. “I remember feeling like I had to fit in, and to me that meant assimilating to whiteness and letting go of my Vietnamese culture, heritage, and pride,” she says. “I pushed all of my Vietnamese identity out of my life in my childhood and young adulthood to assimilate, to fit in or to become American.”

Her insecurities evaporated the moment she picked up a basketball. Nguyen was captain of her high school varsity team, and voted MVP by her teammates three years in a row. “All of your differences… all of that stuff doesn’t matter when you step on the court,” she says. Off the court, Nguyen was struggling with her identity in more ways than one.

One night, determined to speak her truth, she woke up her parents and announced: “I’m gay.” It took nearly a decade, but they have come to “fully embrace who I am,” she says. With time, Nguyen also became more understanding of her parents’ push to assimilate her as a young girl. “[My mom] came to this country, and suffered from a lot of discrimination being different,” she says. “She wanted safety and stability for me, and for her that came from fitting in.”

Nguyen was recruited to play basketball at Clark College, but tore her ACL just weeks before the season started. Devastated from the injury, she put her sports dreams on hold and transferred to Western Washington University sophomore year. She majored in pre-med, pursuing her parents’ dream for her to become a doctor, but quickly found joy in a new hobby. “I stepped into the communal kitchen of my dorm and the rest of the world floated away,” says Nguyen, who spent hours cooking elaborate dishes, like salmon skin hand rolls, miso soup, and pork katsu. Thu, who cooked by memory, walked her daughter through their family recipes on the phone.

Just like back in high school, Nguyen mustered up the courage to confront her parents. This time, it was about her newfound dream to become an executive chef. “[T]hey were like, ‘We didn’t come from Vietnam, struggling all of this time to put you through college so that you can be a servant to somebody else,’ ” she remembers.

After graduation, Nguyen attended culinary school in Portland. Over the next fifteen years, she climbed the ladder from salad bar server to executive chef at Reed College, where she was in charge of all food service programs. The money was good, but Nguyen wasn’t happy. She worked hundred hour weeks, with barely any free time for friends or family. When her parents announced they were organizing a family trip to Vietnam in 2015, she jumped at the chance. “I’ve always felt a big hole in my heart where I felt Vietnam belonged,” she says. “A part of that is that first-generation American guilt, and also all the ways I felt like I had turned my back on my culture when I was young. I thought somehow I could return home and absorb something that I felt like I had been missing.”

The experience overwhelmed Nguyen with a deep sense of belonging. Being in Vietnam “was the first time I was completely immersed in people who looked like me,” she says. “You don’t know you’re in a cage until you get out of it.” She left inspired to create a community where everyone felt as welcome as she had in Vietnam.

Within a month of returning to Portland, Nguyen gave her notice at work, sold all her furniture, and whittled down expenses. For the next few years, she helped run an Airbnb for her parents, and picked up odd jobs off Craigslist. During her “semi-retirement” era, as she calls it, Nguyen watched that fateful 2018 NCAA women’s championship game. It was the final push she needed to see out the Sports Bra. “It got to the point where I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she says. “I would wake up thinking about it, I’d fall asleep thinking about it. And it was really scary because I’d never had anything like that in my whole life.”

Initially, her parents were less than thrilled. “I was so afraid,” Thu says. “But she said, ‘Mom, you cannot stop me, this is something that I need to do.’” Nguyen used $25,000 of her own savings, $105,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, and loans from family and friends to fund the bar. Community volunteers helped design the layout, and one of Nguyen’s friends spent forty hours helping wash hundreds of used pots and pans on her days off from work as a nurse. Other friends taught Nguyen how to count money, manage the books, write an employee handbook, and train non-kitchen staff. Tuong helped to install lighting and the sound system, and Thu helped to perfect the Vietnamese items on the menu.

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The Sports Bra opened its doors in April of 2022, just in time for the women’s NCAA final four. Despite Nguyen’s nerves, the line wrapped around the block. The crowd—almost entirely women, and many of them gay—celebrated, hugged, and cried tears of joy. Some thanked Nguyen. “It’s a safe zone,” explains regular Diana Garza. “[We] don’t have to worry about anybody being hateful, because [Jenny] and her staff don’t tolerate any of that.”

The bar’s success is a testament to how popular women’s sports have become in this country. In the first eight months of opening, it grossed almost a million dollars. Legendary athletes like Brandi Chastain have stopped by. For big games, like the 2023 Women’s Final Four, lines start to form before the bar even opens. “It’s important as a woman, [and] as a feminist, to be at that forefront, where this is a new bar with a new concept and to be out here supporting it,” says patron Kristin Solomon. “With anything in culture, it takes a while for that shift to happen.”

For Nguyen, true success can’t be quantified. But making her parents (who regularly volunteer at the bar) proud is a big win. “It was a tremendous learning experience for me and my wife,” Tuong says. “It was unbelievable. It opened our eyes and our hearts. . . The whole thing came together to me, and that was beautiful. If I die tomorrow, I’m happy.”

The Sports Bra is ready for the Women’s World Cup, which is expected to draw up to two billion viewers this summer. If the U.S. Women’s National Team wins the tournament, they will become the first team in soccer history—men’s or women’s—to pick up three titles in a row. For their first game against Vietnam, Nguyen took over an entire Portland block to host a watch party attended by an estimated 4,000 people.

She hopes that one day there will be a Sports Bra, or at least something like it, in every major U.S. city. She dreams of expanding internationally into Canada, Australia, and the U.K. Maybe even Vietnam. “The key is making sure that the mission stays true,” Nguyen says.

The score is far from settled. Female athletes are still widely underpaid and under appreciated, compared to their male counterparts. But places like the Sports Bra are a reminder that people want to watch women win. For now, that’s good enough. “Whatever I do from here on out is a bonus,” says Nguyen.