A pair of women from Marin are hoping to launch the county’s first-ever women’s sports bar, and they’re looking for local donations to fund it.
Isabella Woods and Soledad Jean-Pierre announced on Friday they’re beginning to crowdfund donations for “The Twelfth,” a women’s sports bar they’ve been dreaming up for years.
And over the last 12 months, they’ve felt the momentum of women’s sports in the Bay Area behind them.
“There are only 10 women’s sports bars in the entire country,” Woods said. “But double that are trying to open.”
Friends for a decade who also play on the same soccer team, The Lemondrops, in the Golden Gate Women’s Soccer League, Woods and Jean-Pierre have been longing for a place to go watch Bay FC, the United States Women’s National Team, the Golden State Valkyries and other women’s sporting events after their games.
Woods said she’s noticed the same thing after her children’s games, when several parents wanted to go watch women’s sports but had nowhere to do it.
“We kept running into a not-very-welcoming space that would put the game on,” Woods said. “Especially here in Marin, where we thought we’d encounter a lot more progressive spaces that would feature women’s sports without blinking an eye. Even if they turned the game on, they wouldn’t turn the sound on. Or it wasn’t kid friendly.”
The Twelfth is seeking to provide a location with a lot of outdoor space for the kids to run around while the parents sit and watch the games, eat pizza or other convenient and order-ahead food items and enjoy a beverage.
The owners named the bar after “The 12th Man,” a term used to describe the fans of a football or soccer team, which uses 11 players on the field.
Woods pointed to places like PizzaHacker and Gott’s Roadside as inspiration in that their layouts are kid-friendly.
“If we’re going to do something like this we really have to make sure people want to go and be there with us instead of sitting and watching at home,” she said. “As a mom of three kids, there are maybe two places in Marin I’ll take my kids to eat because they’ll act like maniacs and I won’t have any fun.”
Woods and Jean-Pierre have been scouting potential locations but said they’ve run into several operators who are reluctant to believe that a women’s sports bar can be successful.
“We get similar questions with people we know and love who say, ‘you’re going to show women’s sports all day? Is there even enough women’s sports on?’” Woods said. “That’s just a lack of information. There’s a huge amount of women’s sports going on. But it’s all hidden behind programming that has a paywall. It’s usually not on the main media networks.
“There are these major events, you’re finally getting this visibility, then you’re going to put another blocker for the audience? They’ll say they don’t have the viewership, but look at the statistics when you don’t have a paywall.”
Viewership for the 2023 Women’s World Cup was historic, reaching 2 billion people world-wide, according to Inside FIFA, while participation in girls’ soccer across the country continues to increase and the growth of the National Women’s Soccer League, including Bay FC, which plays home games in San Jose, has led to record profits for women’s sports team owners. The NWSL’s San Diego Wave, for example, was purchased for $2 million in 2021 and sold for $120 million three years later.
But there are few spaces for people to actually watch the games on TV. A fan of the NWSL would need subscriptions to five different streaming services to catch all the games.
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There’s a huge need for more women’s sports bars, Woods said. She’s also consulted with the owners of Rikki’s, the new women’s sports bar opening soon in San Francisco. And while Rikki’s was funded with investors, The Twelfth hopes to raise $425,000 in crowd-funded donations.
“We’ve felt strongly that we wanted to maintain ownership,” Wood said. “That’s something a lot of women entrepreneurs run into is they’re forced to give a lot of ownership and equity up in order to raise capital. This is a Black-owned business and a women-owned business. It’s important to keep that ownership where it belongs.”
“It’s about getting people to invest their money in the kind of future they want to see, especially in these times. Your money, wherever it’s going, is going to feed a very important message.”