Opening a sports bar for women used to be much harder than it is today — and Jax Diener can tell you that from experience.
"About 30-plus years ago, I wanted to open a sports bar," Diener said. "The friends that I still have in my circle know that I've been talking about this for all of these years."
And while Diener would have loved for this bar to show women's sports, that wasn't even a possibility at the time.
"Back then, you couldn't catch women's sports on TV anywhere — I mean, that just wasn't a thing," she said. "So it wasn't about that. It was just about having a space where we could all be together and watch any sort of sporting event and feel comfortable."
And her dream is finally coming close to fruition, with the bar Watch Me set to open in Long Beach later this year, according to Diener and her co-owner and wife Emme Eddy. It would be the only bar for women's sports in Long Beach and in Greater Los Angeles, not to mention one of a small but quickly growing number of women's sports bars.
Women's sports bars nationwide
If you didn't get it right away, "Watch Me" is a reference to how women athletes often have to prove themselves by showing doubters what they can do — not to mention the act of watching sports, of course.
Watch Me is part of a growing movement of sports bars that exclusively (or at least primarily) show women's sports. The Sports Bra in Portland and Rough & Tumble in Seattle served their first drinks in 2022. Icarus Wings and Things opened last year in Salem, Oregon, and A Bar of Their Own opened in Minneapolis earlier this month — and even more bars are in the works.
Interest in women's sports in the United States isn't new — stars like Lisa Leslie and Mia Hamm drew in big crowds decades ago, to say nothing of Venus and Serena Williams — but the audience has grown in the last 10 years. About 27 million people in the U.S. tuned in to see the U.S. take home the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2015, and nearly 20 million watched the team defend their title in 2019, according to figures from FIFA.
Meanwhile, the 2023 WNBA season has been seeing increased attendance and viewership, which is expected to continue as college superstar Caitlin Clark prepares to go professional, breaking longstanding NCAA scoring records and drawing bigger audiences than her men's basketball counterparts along the way.
And it's much easier now to watch women playing all sorts of games: The Women's Sports Network, which started in 2022, streams women's sports 24/7.
How Watch Me's owners got the ball rolling
Diener said seeing The Sports Bra open in Portland — and do well — was the final push the couple needed to pursue opening a sports bar.
Originally, Diener and Eddy had planned to open a franchised Sports Bra location in Long Beach, even consulting with that bar's owner Jenny Nguyen. But when it came down to it, the two decided starting their own brand was the way to go.
"We spoke to a gentleman who is a franchisor and a franchisee, so it was really great to get that perspective of both sides," Diener said. "He basically said, 'Why are you doing that? Go out and do it on your own.'"
With that said, Diener and Eddy have found some key allies in the L.A. women's sports community: They've struck up partnerships with Angel City F.C. and the L.A. Sparks, and they hope to continue the partnership by becoming the designated place to be for those teams' watch parties and even draft events.
What to expect at Watch Me
First things first: It wouldn't be a proper sports bar without food. Watch Me has already hired a chef, Charlie Ray, who's been working on building out food offerings for the bar's future visitors.
"Some of it is similar to a typical bar menu, but elevated," Eddy said. "Fresh, sustainable, locally grown products and also vegan and vegetarian options in the spirit of inclusivity, and gluten free — there's no barriers for someone who wants to come in and eat."
Watch Me's owners want the bar's inclusivity to go way beyond the menu: They anticipate a big portion of their crowd will be LGBTQ, filling a gap for public spaces for queer women in Long Beach and Orange County.
"The access to those places has really, really gone away, so there's a real need for that, I think, in the community here now," Eddy said.
But even though it's a bar, Diener and Eddy say that they want Watch Me to be a gathering space for people of all ages, from girls' teams coming in after games to collegiate athletes to casual sports fans.
And yes, you can still watch big men's games like the Super Bowl at Watch Me, though this is very much an exception to the rule.
"We're very big NFL fans over here," Diener said. "But we are flipping it — probably 95% of the time you would catch us with women's sports in our space."
When the bar will open
Eddy and Diener are working toward finalizing an opening date: They said they're in advanced negotiations with the owner of one location, and they've started the process of hiring staff and applying for a liquor license.
"We're setting things in place so that when we sign the lease docs, it's a finite amount of time [before opening]," Eddy said.
And Watch Me's owners have set a pretty big deadline for themselves.
"We desperately want to be open by the Olympics," Eddy said. "And we want to be actually open as much before that as we can to have a soft opening and iron out the things that we need to get settled."
The couple has also started a crowdfunding campaign to help kick things off, though they say that they've been slow to see results.
"Our business model is based on the other women's sports bars ahead of us that had very successful crowdfunding campaigns, whether or not they announced their location," Diener said. "We are not experiencing that same thing."
But Eddy and Diener said they hope they'll catch more eyes when their location is announced, and they're still moving forward with the bar opening regardless — just watch them.
"It seems like a slam dunk that there's going to be a crowd for this, a group of people that it's going to fill needs for," Eddy said.
