Upcoming Events 🤩

Happy Hour & Trivia

🗓️ Sunday, March 9
⏰ 5:00-7:00 PM

Wear your Everyone Watches Women’s Sports™ gear for a discount on your drink during Happy Hour!

"For The Bra, it's clear what our keystone — our mission — is. As long as we stay true to the mission, we can adjust everything else. As long as our mission, values, and culture are still intact, then that's all we need."

— Jenny Nguyen, CEO & founder of The Sports Bra

Hear from the Owner 🙌

In April of 2022, Jenny Nguyen and The Sports Bra changed the game. As the first-ever sports bar dedicated to women’s sports, the Bra gave Portlanders a place to cheer, gather, and grow the women’s sports community. In the wake of The Sports Bra’s success, new women’s sports bars are popping up across the country. Read on to learn more about The Sports Bra and its founder, Jenny.

Were you an athlete growing up, and if so, did that play into your ability to lead your team now?

One thousand percent. Everybody knows all the statistics about women CEOs, the benefits of playing sports, and how those benefits show up throughout their lives. So playing sports helped me to do what we're doing now. When you're young, you get on these teams where nobody gets cut, which is so valuable — you have to work with people with different skill sets and skill levels. You find out who your weakest link is, and what their best quality is, so you can highlight that and lift them up. There are so many things that translate from sports into life. I played one sport, and it was basketball. I tried a bunch of other sports, but they didn’t stick like basketball for me.

What was the biggest challenge you had to deal with in opening The Sports Bra, and how did you overcome that?

At the beginning, one of the biggest challenges was getting content. It was 2022, and as a sports bar, we needed to have enough content playing on the TVs. I reached out to ESPN, and a couple of other media companies, and they all were great about letting us use their content and those kinds of things. Once we felt like we had enough streaming and content to fill in the gap between live sports, that felt good. Once we opened, I started to wonder how much more streaming content we could get, so I literally carved out about two hours every week to cold call or email teams, leagues, content creators, and streaming services to ask if we could have permission to show their content since many of them have terms and conditions against showing their content in public. We created a spreadsheet to organize our permissions and how to find the approved content online, and we cobbled together a pretty robust schedule of content.

Once the publicity took off, we were fielding so many requests from people asking us to show things, which made finding content much easier — but at the very beginning, it was like cutting through the jungle with a butter knife.

What advice would you give someone interested in starting their own women’s sports bar?

It’s probably not much different than any other entrepreneur. Have six plans — like, a plan A through D at the least. Be adaptable, because nothing ever how you think it's going to go. Every single moment, there's a snag. If you let the snags get you down, you'll never get off the ground. So keep going, push through it, adapt — and have a good keystone.

For The Bra, it's clear what our keystone — our mission — is. As long as we stay true to the mission, we can adjust everything else. As long as our mission, values, and culture are still intact, then that's all we need.

I recommend building extremely strong relationships with the community. So many people are impacted by the opening of spaces like these. It means a lot to the entire community. It's not just girls and it's not just sports. When you create a physical space that hasn't ever existed before in an area, you become a community leader, whether you like it or not. That is going to happen. 
If you’re not that type, you’re going to have to learn to be that type or try something else. One of my biggest challenges is I'm very much a behind-the-scenes person and introvert. I was a chef in my past life and I did not do well on the other side of the wall. I had to learn really quickly to develop that ability, and that was one of my personal biggest challenges.

Tell us about a rewarding moment you've experienced since opening The Sports Bra.

There's a lot of different ways that it shows up. One of my proudest moments was in 2023, my grandparents had their wedding anniversary and my grandpa's birthday party. They're from Houston, but we had a family reunion here in Portland and we threw a giant party for them. My entire family was at the Bra. We rented a band; we had a potluck with a bunch of Vietnamese food. 
Everybody brought something and we just had a ball. To have four generations of my family in a space…I was just really proud.

Few Favs:

Favorite item on the menu?

Mom's Baby Back Ribs. It was my favorite dish growing up as a kid — it was the dish that got me into the culinary arts. When I wrote the menu, it was the very first dish I knew had to be on there: some version of my mom's clay pot braised pork. 


Favorite female/non-binary athletes:

Coco Gauff. She's the first one that comes to mind. Every time I see her and watch her play, I feel a sense of pride as if I know her. She shows up so authentically all the time, which I love. She says it like it is, and she's just hilarious. She can laugh at herself.

Favorite women's sports moment of the last couple of years:

I was in DC for the NWSL championship. I had gotten the invite to go months before the game was set, so I had no idea that Portland Thorns were going to be in the finals. When Portland won, I was so thrilled, cheering like crazy. I ran down to the section where the Riveters, our supporters group, were seated. 
About 350 people flew to DC with that group to fill out the stands for our team. I ran over there and was cheering with them, but then I got a FaceTime call from one of our bartenders. She turned the phone around and the Bra was jam-packed with everybody inside cheering. Then I turned the phone around at the Riveters, and at that moment, we were cheering together from coast to coast. I remember that being so overwhelming — like this moment will never happen again. 


Favorite sport to watch:

Volleyball has piqued my interest, particularly to watch live.