If we were sitting in our bar today (Vol. 2)

If you’re reading this, it’s because you signed up to follow along as I work to start a sports bar in SF centered on women’s sports. This is one in a series of occasional dispatches about life in the future bar. It’s an experiment — but it’s all kind of a big experiment. Thanks for being on the ride.

If you just want a quick update on the state of the actual bar, scroll to the end.

If we were sitting in our bar today, we’d be getting psyched for Bay FC’s first weeknight match, another first in this season of firsts for our first NWSL team.

Confession: Until Bay FC joined the NWSL this year, I’d been a pretty inconsistent follower of women’s soccer. In gymnastics fandom, there’s a concept of the “four-year fan” — someone who shows up just in time to watch the Olympics, immediately develops a lot of loud opinions about the lineups or the scoring or whatever, and then forgets to care again until 2028. I wasn’t quite that with soccer, but I wasn’t … not that, either. I’d watch the USWNT in the World Cup or the Olympics or an international friendly, and I knew the major players, and I would tell myself I’d follow the sport into the regular season this time. I’d even pick a team (usually the Thorns — sorry, Thorns) and try to keep up. And inevitably, I’d fall off.

I’d still have said I was a fan of women’s soccer. But it’s a whole different thing now with a local team to follow. Proximity matters, but maybe even more than that, infrastructure matters. Before, I wanted to follow soccer; now, soccer follows me around, too. Matches are on local TV, the local paper’s reporters are covering the team, I see car magnets and sweatshirts just walking around town. I have friends with season tickets. I have tickets for June. It’s in the air in a different way.

It helps that the actual sport is good — that Bay FC matches have been chaotic and compelling, that they’ve come down to the wire more than once, that already I have that “welp, anything can happen” feeling watching them. But that’s not all. Earlier this week, as I was driving the carpool home from my daughter’s dance class, my kid’s friend suddenly informed me that she’s going to a women’s soccer game and it’s going to be on her birthday and her whole soccer team will get to go on the field and maybe everyone will sing happy birthday to her. And I was like, yep, there it is — that’s the thing about local sports. It’s the athletic competition itself, and then it’s all the stuff around it too, the atmosphere and the stadium snacks and the kids getting to be on the field. That’s how the magic happens. That’s how the growth happens. That’s how going to a women’s soccer match becomes a normal thing you do even if you’ve never been a “real fan” before. That’s how you end up getting your friends to come out and watch for a while on a regular old Wednesday night at the San Francisco women’s sports bar of the future.

In actual bar news

It is a wild time to be in the women’s sports bar world, a sentence that could barely have been written two years ago. Last week, The Sports Bra — Jenny Nguyen’s Portland bar that was the first to show that women’s sports spaces are both an incredible community-builder AND an incredible business — announced plans to expand, with an investment from Alexis Ohanian (or as we call him in this house, Mister Serena Williams). The coolest thing for me to see, as that news spread beyond the sports world and into Fast Company and the Associated Press, was just how big the demand truly is for places like this. The comments on so many Instagram posts about the expansion prove it: Come to my town. Come to Austin, Miami, Orlando, the Bay. Come here; we’re hungry for a bar made for watching our sports together. Come here; we’re ready.

If you’re reading this and wondering “so is this going to be a Sports Bra franchise?” — there aren’t a ton of public details yet about what franchising would mean. What I care about is building something that makes sense here, a place we want and love and believe in and want to spend time hanging out in on that regular old Wednesday. (I’d love to know what that means to you, btw, so smash that reply button and let me know what you see.)

Things in this market are changing faster than I could have imagined even a couple of months ago — and that means it’s a noisy place to be a lot of the time. A super fun noisy party of a place! But still noisy. For now I’m moving forward, bite by tiny bite, and trying to trust that the right things will cut through the noise in time.

So, on that note: I’m touring two spaces this week — my two favorites so far, based on their real estate fliers and online glamour shots. Cross your fingers, cross your toes?

Thanks for reading, thanks for being on the ride. Join me next time for another dispatch. In the meantime — feel free to forward this to the friend you see yourself sitting with at the San Francisco women’s sports bar of the future.