How Women’s Sports Bars Are Bringing Fans and Brands to March Madness

The Caitlin Clark effect is getting an assist from bars committed to women’s sports as March Madness hustles into Final Four weekend. But reaching this point meant overcoming long odds.

A year ago, hospitality veterans Claudia Capriles and Alexandra Murray had just finished raising funds for their pop-up bar Athena Keke’s. Named after their cat and dubbed “a queer bar for women’s sports,” Athena Keke’s hosted its first Final Four at a pop-up event in a small room in the back of a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with the bar’s owners, their friends and one small television at low volume. Capriles and Murray ended up watching the tournament final at home.

It’s a completely different game this year.

After a year of pop-up events—including Gotham FC and FIFA Women’s World Cup viewing parties, post-game dance parties and a queer happy hour that included a screening of the 2006 gymnastics classic Stick It—Athena Keke’s built a network of small community groups and sports leagues and clubs that helped its events grow. It has since been featured in Vogue and by media and commerce company Togethxr in a guide of 21 bars in North America that have pledged to air the women’s tournament.

Though the price and elusiveness of adequate New York real estate means the bar still doesn’t have a permanent home, its following has grown enough that it’s holding a watch party for the NCAA women’s final at The Fulton in Brooklyn—a bar with a maximum capacity of 200.

That growth is coming just in time.

Women’s college basketball viewership is putting up historic numbers. ESPN audiences for the women’s Sweet 16 averaged 2.4 million viewers per game, up 96% from the same slate in 2023. The women’s Elite 8, meanwhile, helped ESPN reach 6.2 million viewers for each matchup, representing a 184% increase over the year before.

Caitlin Clark and Iowa’s win over LSU alone drew viewership of 12.3 million, exceeding every game of the World Series and the Stanley Cup Finals, the average audience of Amazon’s NFL Thursday Night Football and all but one game of both the 2023 NBA Finals and this year’s men’s March Madness. That’s a boon to the bars showing women’s sports—but also to the brands that want in.

“It is mutually beneficial for getting people to come to your bar and showing these games and to team up with us and help promote it,” Capriles said. “There’s a demand, and I don’t know that people caught on, but I think they’re catching on now for sure, and this has helped give a nudge in that direction.”

A game plan for growth

Even bars that own their space have needed help meeting March Madness demand.

Former chef Jenny Nguyen opened The Sports Bra in Portland, Ore., almost two years ago. At the time, it was the only bar in the United States dedicated to women’s sports. The 50-seat establishment has since been a clue in The New York Times crossword puzzle and hosted sitting U.S. senators, WNBA and NWSL executives, and brands including Clif, Buick, Focus Features and several others whose messaging aligns with the bar’s mission.

This past weekend, with Portland hosting Sweet 16 and Elite 8 matchups, The Sports Bra needed a little extra space and teamed with Togethxr and Aflac for viewing parties at Spirit of 77—that sports bar can hold more than 400 fans. The events featured segments from WNBA players and The Syd + TP Show hosts Sydney Colson and Theresa Plaisance—as well as meet-and-greets with Diana Taurasi, Nneka Ogwumike, Elena Delle Donne and Aliyah Boston—in a space replete with Aflac-blue basketballs and plush duck mascots.

At several points on each game day, the line waiting to get into the watch parties snaked out the door and down the block.

“People speculated, ‘Oh, do people watch this? I don’t think anyone’s interested … and what would it look like?’” Nguyen said. “We opened the doors to a space where people have easy access to it—it is dedicated to it—then bam, Day One, 3,000 people show up. We’ve tapped into something that has been needed for a long time.”

Togethxr co-founder and chief content officer Jessica Robertson had her internal team calling bars around the country and securing pledges to air women’s games. They did so with the mentality of decades’ worth of women’s sports fans who’ve faced the discomforting and unnecessary obstacle of having their local bartender or fellow patrons serve as the gatekeeper between them and a WNBA, NWSL or NCAA women’s game on a random Tuesday night. And they brought basketball luminaries, Aflac and a whole lot of fans to The Sports Bra’s party to enhance the argument for more screens for women’s sports.

“If you think about all the ways in which women’s sports have been underinvested in, held back and all the biases they’ve faced, something as small as walking into a bar and not being able to watch games hurts,” Robertson said. “So for someone like Jenny, or some of the other bars that are popping up around the country dedicated to women’s sports and creating a communal environment, they are changing the entire landscape.”

The stats don’t lie

Jen Barnes, a former business executive, opened Seattle’s Rough & Tumble Pub a year ago as a home for fans of women’s sports and also for the women who are fans of men’s sports. The NWSL’s Reign and WNBA’s Storm get screen time at Rough & Tumble, but so do the NHL’s Kraken and the NFL’s Seahawks. 

She pointed out that sports marketing remains rooted in data and perceptions centered on male sports fans and traditional, male-focused campaigns. Backed by generations of women’s sports being forced to prove their worth with empirical evidence while male counterparts often skated by on benefit of the doubt, Barnes built Rough & Tumble’s business plan on a pile of data.

That ever-changing stack of figures includes Sports Innovation Lab’s Fan Project, which found that women’s sports fans are not only acquired and retained at a 40% higher rate than average sports fans, but they also spent more with Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and luxury and travel brands as a result of being so heavily engaged.

The data encompasses the latest numbers from Deloitte, which predicts that revenue generated by women’s sports will exceed $1 billion (to a projected $1.28 billion) for the first time in 2024—with every dollar spent generating more than seven in “customer value for that organization.”

According to Barnes, women’s sports are making sports marketing more profitable, more equitable and more inclusive by following the data, which has brands including Starbucks, Brooks Running, Siete Foods and apparel maker Oiselle seeking a place in Rough & Tumble alongside the Reign, Storm and community groups like Common Goal, Charlie’s Queer Books and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Joining the team

With more brands looking to get in the game, their motivations matter.

When Auburn freshman Kharyssa Richardson suffered a head injury at the Las Vegas Invitational in November 2022, lying on the floor for 45 minutes waiting for paramedics, Aflac decided it had seen enough. It shifted its spending from the men’s Final Four to the women’s Final Four and teamed with South Carolina coach and Aflac pitchwoman Dawn Staley and the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) to address Dawn’s List of inequities in women’s sports.

After spending nothing on women’s sports in 2022, Aflac has teamed with Togethxr this year and increased its overall investment by 400%. CMO Garth Knutson noted that Aflac’s products don’t directly support women’s sports—they cover gaps in health insurance expenses—but the majority of his intended audience of health care decision makers (and Aflac’s management) are women.

By teaming with Togethxr to reach that audience with the right message, and with The Sports Bra to share that message with the right communities, Knutson and Aflac are finding a place in women’s sports spaces by putting their brand second to the game—which earned Knutson and his women’s sports-touting Aflac shirt a fist bump from Taurasi during the Sweet 16.

“There are people out there who are starting to see Aflac show up. and it’s not so much that they expect it, but they accept it,” Knutson said. “We’re not trying to buy our way into a community that is as tight-knit as women’s sports. … I’d like to say that we’re earning our way into it with our actions.”

As Knutson noted, whether it’s Aflac teaming up with The Sports Bra or any one of the brands looking to score points with patrons at Rough & Tumble, the follow-through is as important as the initial shot.

“Fans of women’s sports aren’t just women (by a long shot),” Barnes said. “But regardless of gender, the industry’s fan base is most responsive to value-based marketing and genuine, collaborative partnerships that is (most of all) appreciative of both the long-term fan base that has built the industry and the athletes whom we love.”