When you flip to a sports channel, you will be hoping to see your favourite team play their respective sport. However, in many sports channels you will be seeing mostly men’s sports, and it will be hard to find much content regarding women’s sports in mainstream media.
One lady decided to change all that.
Jenny Nguyen, a Portland-born chef who has cooked in places like Adidas and Lewis, is on her way to set up the first ever women’s sports bar, named The Sports Bra.
The Sports Bra will be airing all of the women’s games and events, and Nguyen will be working with Just Women’s Sports to get access to their digital content to ensure there will always be something to watch in The Sports Bra.
Striving to bring the strength and abilities of girls to her bar, she hopes to work with companies or organisations that are “Women-owned and operated, or women who are behind the scenes.”
She is looking to work with breweries like Gateway Brewing, which is run by a husband and wife team, or Migration Brewing, run by women.
The chairs and tables that will be used, Nguyen will be working with Girls Build to get them, as they will be built by girls. This nonprofit organisation teaches girls aged 8-14 the basics of carpentry and other skills.
The motto of the bar is “We Support Women,” and just like that motto, many people came to support her cause, which hopefully will make this a huge success.
Growing up, Nguyen played a lot of basketball, and she dreamt of taking it to college and even beyond, but in her freshman year there was a change of plans.
She blew out her knee a week before the season started. This left the then 19-year-old devastated, as basketball was her whole life.
When she went to college the year after, she discovered cooking and it changed her life. She could translate the energy she had for basketball in the culinary arts, and eventually found her passion for it. She went to a culinary school in Portland, and eventually started working as a chef at places such as Adidas and Lewis and Clark College. As Nyugen put it: “That really gave me the chops with all different kinds of cuisine. We were cooking everything under the sun.”
When 2020 came around, she was left jobless and thinking about what to do next. During this period, the joke of her longtime friends about opening a sports bar dedicated to showing women’s sports became an idea, and from there she started planning.
The name was easy for her to make, taking the word Sports Bar and turning it into Sports Bra. It’s a plain name and you wouldn’t take much notice of it, but that’s the point of it, according to Nguyen. “You want to show the world that it’s these small, tiny changes, that’s all it takes.”
The bar will be featuring non-alcoholic, gluten-free, vegan and vegetarian menu options, and Nguyen strives to make a space that children and families can enter. She hopes that it would make a difference, to allow a place for little girls to belong in sports to exist.
Nguyen is targeting to set the grand opening of The Sports Bra in early April.
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