How women’s sports bars are changing the game for fans

Any women’s sports fan who walks into the 1972 Pub will feel immediately at home. Named after the year of the passing of Title IX, the groundbreaking legislation that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex at federally-funded educational institutions and opened the door to sports participation for women and girls, the 1972 Pub is the only women’s sports bar in Austin, Texas – and one of several such establishments that have popped up around the country since the early 2020s.

In many ways, it’s just like any other sports bar, but with a refreshing twist for women’s sports fans.

The walls of the 1972 Pub are peppered with framed Sports Illustrated covers featuring female athletes from Brandi Chastain to Candace Parker. Women’s sports memorabilia and banners from Togethxr and the Women’s Sports Foundation hang from the ceilings and walls. Take a closer look and you’ll notice signed jerseys from local Texas sports stars like Mia Scott and Dijonai Carrington. The pub also hosts women’s sports trivia nights and highlights local sports teams, from Austin’s semi-professional women’s soccer team, the Austin Rise, to local teams within the Granny Basketball League, a recreational sports league for female basketball players that are at least 50 years old. And for events like the WNBA finals, it’s the best place in town to grab a drink and watch a game.

The 1972 Pub is owned by Debra Hallum and her partner Marlene du Plessis, who wanted to start a business with a purpose in Austin.

“We thought about a coffee shop, but, you know, that’s saturated.They’re on every corner,” Hallum explained. “And so, in the year 2022, I saw the article about Jen Nguyen opening the Sports Bra in Portland, and I showed it to Marlene, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, we both love sports. And you can’t have women’s sports without LGBTQ+ [folks].’ I mean, they just go together, and it’s about women, right? Women’s sports on the televisions, I mean, this is purpose, this does so much about what we have been talking about.”

du Plessis and Hallum continued brainstorming ideas for their business. But an in-person visit to a women’s sports bar cemented the idea to commit to the 1972 Pub in Hallum’s mind.

“We were in Seattle, and we went to the Rough and Tumble, and met the owner there, Jen Barnes, and visited with her, and just seeing it in person, and everybody there, it was just incredible,” Hallum said. “You know, some of them were just laughing and hanging out and having a great time, and some of them were there watching WNBA games, some of them had come for trivia, and I looked at Marlene, and I said, I really need to look at Austin, because I think this would be a great fit, a great place for Austin.” 

1972 opened its doors this past spring and, although Hallum says the pub is still in a “growth phase” after six months in business, it has seen solid crowds for marquee events like women’s March Madness and the WNBA playoffs. 2025 was an especially salient year for Texas women’s sports fans, as the Longhorns made their first Final Four run since 2003 and the UT softball team won its first ever national championship. Add in the debut of League One Volleyball and Athletes Unlimited Softball featuring teams in Austin over the past couple of years and Austin is quickly becoming a women’s sports hub in one of the most progressive and fast-growing cities in Texas. 

And of course, women’s sports as a whole are also on the rise. Not only are WNBA stars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, and A’ja Wilson increasingly becoming household names, but viewership has steadily been increasing over the years. Female athletes from the youth level to the pros are also enjoying increased opportunities, from WNBA CBA negotiations to increases in flag football programs for girls. In other words, there is no better time to be a women’s sports fan or a female athlete, and women’s sports bars play no small part in that.

Similarly, women’s sports bars are thriving. Nguyen’s Sports Bra generated over a million dollars in revenue in its first eight months, plans to open multiple locations across the country in the future. The Rough and Tumble also has plans for expansion. Babes Sports Bar, which recently opened in Chicago, saw such a warm welcome on its opening night that the owners had to close the following day due to limited supplies. And the number of women’s sports bars across the country is expected to quadruple in coming years.

This movement comes on the heels of increased eyes on women’s sports, which is a movement that many traditional sports bars have failed to capitalize on. 

“If you go into a regular sports bar today, you have to beg to have women on the television,” Hallum explained. “Sometimes they’ll do it, sometimes they give you sound, sometimes they don’t, but we’ve heard from a lot of customers, ‘Oh, I was down at X bar, and they argued with me that [a women’s game] wasn’t on, and they won’t put it on. Or they told me, ‘Absolutely not.’ They’ve got eight TVs, and there are nine football games on, so they can’t, you know?’”

With this demand in mind, you would think that running a women’s sports bar like the 1972 Pub would be a breeze. But Hallum notes that there are several unique challenges to running a bar that is centered around women’s sports. For instance, gaps in programming impact not only women’s sports fans, but women’s sports bar owners.

“We try to make sure and advertise [that patrons can] ask the staff if there’s something you want to watch, and it’s not on the television,” she said. “And we try to say we will accommodate the best we can, because it’s still very difficult. There are a lot of women’s stuff that we cannot access as a business because it’s not on the right channel or the right streaming platform, that we’re not allowed to use. It’s very different still for men.”

Even so, the 1972 Pub strives to stick to its brand and offer a safe space for women and nonbinary folks who just want to go to a bar to enjoy watching a game in a space that is designed to appeal to them. In essence, this is how women’s sports bars are changing the game for female fans. It’s rare for women to get the opportunity to enjoy spaces in sports that are designed specifically for them. And although the 1972 Pub is for everyone and is advertised as family-friendly, its core audience remains the same.

“I think it’s that understanding that it’s gonna be primarily a space focused on women, and women on TV,” Hallum said. “Everyone is welcome, but we get a lot of female customers. And in our research, we found the largest consumers of women’s sports are lesbians and non-binary fans. And so, they know they have this space, and I think that’s how we exist for women and women’s sports. It’s a very safe space, and I think that lesbians and non-binary individuals feel comfortable in those spaces and will come.”

That said, the 1972 Pub has recently made the decision to expand beyond just airing women’s sports events. With its proximity to the University of Texas and increased requests for UT football, 1972 has adapted to fit consumer demands.

“We had a ton of lesbians, non-binary folks, and even women who identify as straight women… they would say, ‘We don’t get out, we watch at home, we’re not connecting at these events and getting out because’–I didn’t choose this word, but it has been used with me so many times that they think men’s sports bars are toxic,” Hallum explained. “That they’re either having to fight the men off from trying to flirt with them, because, you know, they’re drinking and they’re coming on to them, trying to bother them when they’re there to watch sports. And then just that they’re not comfortable in these highly male places, and they were begging us: ‘Please,  I love UT football, I just want to watch UT football, but I’m not getting out of my house for games, and I’m not gonna go to these other places.’”

At first, Hallum and du Plessis didn’t want to waiver from their original business plan and stick to women’s sports. But eventually, the requests to play some men’s sports became “overwhelming” in Hallum’s words.

“We were hearing it so much, getting emails and DMs about it, and hearing these women needing a safe space, or a place where they felt that they wouldn’t have that mansplaining,” she explained. “They wouldn’t have people coming on to them and trying to pick them up. And so, we polled the [Instagram] followers. And more than 75% of them said yes, to please show some men’s events.”

The overwhelming demand for a space space for these fans to watch sports unbothered highlights a key issue that non-male sports fans face in simply being a fan: the fact that sports viewership isn’t safe for everyone. Data from recent studies show that up to 13% of women feel unsafe at in-person sporting events. This reality is why women’s sports bars like the 1972 Pub are vital safe spaces for a sizable, yet vulnerable, population of sports fans. 

“The inside will always be focused on women for the memorabilia and our walls,” Hallum explained, adding that when men’s sports are on, “you probably won’t get sound if there’s something on for the women, if you’re competing with women. But for UT football, for example, if it’s at 11 a.m., and we open the doors, those are the only people coming in, and we go around, we try to make sure we know the customer. And if everyone is there to watch the football game, and they’re all like-minded fans, then we turn it on and we give them sound. But if there are any number of women who are wanting to watch women’s rugby, or women’s soccer, that’s gonna be the sound, or sometimes it’s just so rowdy, we just put on music. But it’s really important that women remain the priority, whatever we’re doing.”

In other words, women’s sports bars like the 1972 Pub act as subversions of the sports industry. Whereas sports media dedicates roughly 15% of its coverage to women’s sports, female athletes dominate the screens at women’s sports bars. For fans like Hallum who grew up in an entirely different landscape, women’s sports bars are a sacred space to reclaim something valuable that has been lost to time.

“We only got something on the television during the Olympics every two years, and on the weekends, at times, we would get gymnastics and ice skating,” Hallum said. “I think that early on, there was this patriarchal belief that it’s okay for women to be in gymnastics and be into ice skating, because they’re not going to get hurt, and they need to have those dance bodies, and that’s the only sport that women should be doing, and so that’s what we had growing up. And my mother loved it, and so I watched a ton of gymnastics and ice skating with my mother, and then we would watch it during the summer and Winter Olympics. But that was it.”

Today’s young athletes and fans clearly have more options. While gymnastics remains popular both from a participation and viewership standpoint, volleyball is the fastest growing youth sport in the country. Additionally, thanks to the NFL FLAG initiative, flag football programs are also becoming increasingly widespread and popular for girls at the youth and high school level, seeing growth of 60% from previous years. Volleyball isn’t far behind with a growth rate of 40% from 2023-2024, and, as more schools are launching girls’ wrestling programs, the sport has seen a 15% participation increase. Of course, Title IX, which the 1972 Pub is named for, played a huge role in increasing access to sports. But the power of media representation for young girls cannot be understated, and it’s one of the reasons that the 1972 Pub is a family friendly establishment.

“Being family-friendly, all ages was a big deal to us because not only are we trying to grow viewership and interest in women’s sports, But also, [with] the whole see her, be her movement with young women, right? They need to see it…because I didn’t see it.”

And now that Hallum gets to see and share her vision every day she opens the doors to the 1972 Pub, after six months in business, it still hasn’t gotten old.

“I was watching professional women’s disc golf the other day. Holy cow. I mean, that is just so different than my childhood, yeah. Very different. And when I go in now, every day, and I turn on the televisions, it still has not gotten old for me to be in awe.”