The Sports Bra, Portland’s first ladies’s sports activities bar, is the thought of proprietor Jenny Nguyen, March 1, 2022 (KOIN)

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The world’s first and solely ladies’s sports activities bar, The Sports Bra, is petitioning for Portland to have its very personal skilled ladies’s basketball crew — and the petition has already acquired assist from Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden.

Bar proprietor Jenny Nguyen began the Change.org petition on Thursday, March 23. In simply the 5 days since, the petition has garnered greater than 900 signatures and counting.

“It’s time to bring a WNBA team to Portland, a place where we support women and women’s sports,” the petition says. “The Rose City has a proven track record of showing up for our women’s teams and a growing community of fans eager for a new team to root for.”

The petition goes on to quote Oregon’s profitable ladies’s sports activities groups, comparable to National Women’s Soccer League champions Portland Thorns, the Oregon Ducks ladies’s basketball program that included present WNBA participant Sabrina Ionescu, and former WNBA crew the Portland Fire — which Willamette Week reports introduced in additional than 8,000 followers an evening.

Just a few petition signers had comparable causes for wanting the WNBA within the Rose City, saying that their household held season tickets to Portland Fire video games and seeing the crew impressed them as younger feminine basketball gamers.

Other supporters mentioned {that a} new sports activities crew could be worthwhile for Portland’s unsaturated sports activities market and that the town has gifted athletes who need to journey abroad to play on their sports activities groups.

Nguyen’s petition additionally speaks to the success of the Sports Bra, which not too long ago celebrated its one-year anniversary. Since opening, the bar has gained worldwide consideration from Vogue, NPR, Bloomberg, and so on., and grow to be a sizzling spot for ladies’s sports activities followers.

Sen. Wyden shared the petition by way of Twitter on Tuesday morning, thanking The Sports Bra for “making it just this easy for every Oregonian to make a big assist in the growing team effort to bring the @WNBA to Portland.”

This petition is the newest push in a statewide effort to carry skilled ladies’s basketball to Portland.

In September 2022, Wyden despatched a letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and WNBA Commissioner Cathy Englebert to advocate for a neighborhood WNBA crew. The two mentioned that they have been actively contemplating the Rose City for his or her growth.

Earlier this yr in February, sports activities figures with the Oregon Ducks ladies’s basketball crew, Oregon State ladies’s basketball crew and the Portland Trail Blazers participated in a spherical desk when Commissioner Englebert visited city.

At the time, the commissioner mentioned that growth may very well be between two and 4 years away, and she or he needed to slender her record of cities right down to 10 from 20.