“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.
