At The Ultimate Lineup we are all about supporting women in sports and in the community. Our highlighted business was started by a passionate and dedicated 43-year-old who used her life savings to open a bar that only plays women’s sports. Jenny Nguyen is a lifelong basketball fan who played the sport at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, before tearing her ACL. She’s also a longtime restaurant worker who spent three years as Reed College’s executive chef.
In 2018, Nguyen and a group of friends wanted to watch the NCAA women’s basketball championship game. They went to a mostly empty sports bar and still had to plead with a bartender to switch one of the smallest TVs — which played without sound — from a men’s sport to the women’s championship game, she recalls. Together, they jumped up and down celebrating “one of the best games I’ve ever seen,” Nguyen says, as a buzzer-beating three-point shot sealed the championship title for Notre Dame. Afterward, she was struck by the normalcy of her situation.
″[We’d] gotten so used to watching a game like that in the way that we did,” she says, adding that they’d only find better viewing conditions “if we had our own place.”
When Jenny Nguyen signed the lease to create her dream bar, she wasn’t sure it would stay open for more than a few months. But earlier this month, 43-year-old Nguyen’s first-of-its-kind establishment in Portland, Oregon, celebrated its one-year anniversary. Aptly named The Sports Bra, it’s a sports bar where only women athletes appear on the TVs.
Read more about Jenny’s vision and how this sports bar is making a difference. And if you are in Oregon, stop on by!
https://www.cnbc.com/make-it/success/
https://www.thesportsbrapdx.com/