By Sophia-Joelle McDowell
Photos by Whitney Young

When the CPKC Stadium opened at Berkley Riverfront Park in Kansas City last year, it was the first professional women’s sports stadium in the United States to open to the public. Welcome to teal town, baby! As Kansas Citians, we couldn’t be prouder to cheer on the KC Current—and women’s sports news in the metro keeps getting better.

Downtown Kansas City is getting something you may not have realized was missing: a sports bar dedicated to women’s sports. Rachel Glenn and Monica Brady, partners in business and in life, are the masterminds behind The Dub. We spoke with them about the exciting new spot heading our way. Get excited Kansas City! 

Can you tell us about your journey of bringing Kansas City its first-ever bar devoted to women’s sports? 

Monica: Well, at this point, we are officially a year into it. A little over. It started before that, though. I was inspired by The Sports Bra in Portland. They opened in 2022, and when they opened, it was really like, duh, why isn’t there more spaces for women’s sports fans? I was living in Omaha with my wife at the time, and I started thinking about it. I was like, that’s a really great idea, and I would love to open one of those. Then we moved to Kansas City last August for my wife’s job and it started rattling around again with the Current and the impetus of women’s sports in where it was in the world at that point, but especially in Kansas City being such a huge sports town, being such a supporter of the Current, and everything that’s going on. I was like, I think Kansas City is the right place.

No one was doing it. In my brain, if we didn’t do it, someone else would—and good on them, but I have a business background; and I’ve always wanted to be connected to sports in some way working in my day-to-day life. That’s always been my dream, but I never knew how to get there, and this kind of happened. I was like, I think this is it. So I wrote the business plan about this time last year, put it out there to friends and family, and everyone said go for it. So we just kept moving forward. Here we are a year later. 

What can we expect from the food and drink menus? 

Monica: One thing we’re really passionate about is being tied to the community. So our food and drink menu will feature as many local, queer-owned, minority-owned options as possible. Everything from the beer to the liquor to the food. We’ve already had a lot of local purveyors reach out, which we’re really excited about. 

The drink menu, the bar program will be all of those things. Hopefully, Friction will make a beer for us, and then we’ll have a great wine list. I’m a certified sommelier, so I’m really passionate about wine. I’m going to have a really nice wine list and a really nice cocktail list. Because another impetus behind this is that oftentimes my wife may just want to go watch a game, but we don’t want to have a basic beer, like we want to have a good cocktail. We want to have a good glass of wine, and you can’t really do that at a traditional sports club, so we want to bring that energy. 

Then we have a really great mocktail list. We don’t want anyone to feel excluded from the joy of watching women’s sports or watching sports in general just because they don’t drink. That’s not what we’re about. We want to have a really great mocktail list—and affordable because sometimes mocktails are not affordable.

Food-wise, the space that we’re in right now does not allow for a hood, so we won’t have fried items like burgers and fries. We’re going to go a little bit different and more unique with it. We’ll have hot sandwiches. We’ll have nachos, charcuterie boards, flat breads, stuff like that. I always love to support local and really make a highlight to be a part of the community.

We need more inclusive and safe spaces right now. You already foster that through your events, but building this space takes us to the next level. How does it feel to know you’re bringing that to the area? 

Rachel: It’s incredible. It’s exciting. I think you’re right. We do need a lot more spaces. I think everywhere should be inclusive, and they’re just not, unfortunately. It feels exciting. We get a lot of good feedback. Pretty much everywhere we go, people just tell us how excited they are, they can’t wait, they need it. We’re proud to bring it! 

Monica: Proud is a great word. We are an inherently queer space, and we are so proud of that. We love to see more queer spaces opening, and we want to foster any community that wants to gather and feel safe there at The Dub. There’s a lot of community around people who don’t know a lot about sports but also want to get into it, so that’s something we really want to foster as well. We’re gonna have education classes and things like that to bring people in and say, hey, you know, I don’t know anything about soccer, but I’m interested in doing something with soccer, so come to our soccer 101, we’ll teach you the basics, and then we’ll go watch a game. We want it to be a non-threatening environment for people of all groups. 

Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your love of sports.

Monica: I grew up playing soccer. That’s definitely my first love. I also swam. Just was an athlete growing up. I grew up watching sports with my dad and my mom, and it’s just always kind of been part of who I am—like a fabric of my being. Unfortunately, it’s always been men’s, because women haven’t had the exposure that they deserve. I can remember very vividly watching the 1999 World Cup. I was playing soccer at the time, and watching that win was ethereal. So really, it’s just never stopped

Rachel: Same here. I grew up in a really small town, so we didn’t have a lot of extracurricular options. There weren’t clubs and things like that, so it was sports. You just fell into the next sport of the next season. You were just kind of year-round in sports. By the time we get to high school, you can kind of choose if you want to do that or not, and I always did. I stopped playing competitively after high school, but always whatever leagues I could get into—even as an adult, we’ve both been in whatever leagues we can play in as adults. I think it’s been a huge part of our relationship, even from day one, bonding over watching rival games. So, sports in general is pretty ingrained. We’ve just become huge advocates for women’s sports specifically.

How did your pop-up events grow into this big idea for your own permanent location? 

Monica: So the idea has always been about a permanent location. Honestly, the pop-ups have come out of necessity because it’s taken so much longer than we anticipated to open a permanent location. So being, you know, in these very welcoming other businesses has been incredible. You know, KC is a big small town. It feels like everyone is very invested in our success, and that just has been so amazing. We reached out to The Big Rip first, they were one of our first pop-ups, and it went really well. Then other businesses started reaching out to us to come here. Just that in itself, shows the support that we have and the support that our followers have. We love being here to bring a crowd. If Friction can make some money. Why not? 

Rachel: We wanted to do pop-ups pretty much to get our name out there and exposure. But, because we don’t have a space, it’s really all we can do to give a place for our community to kind of gather. Like she said, we know that Friction loves sports and they have their own following for different sports, so we wanted to help them foster a community too, and give people more options and places to go. It’s fun!

The news has been really dark surrounding trans women in sports. Can you tell us your thoughts on why it’s important for trans women to be involved? 

Monica: Trans women belong in sports. Trans men belong in sports. I mean, they’re women and they’re men. It is very dark, and it’s very disheartening what the administration is doing around the trans community, and it’s makes us both very emotional, because trans people exist, and they always have, and they always will and taking away the joy and support from any human is a really shitty way to say that you’re not a good person and not a nice person. Our stance will always be that trans people belong in sports.

How can our readers support The Dub as you finish up the final steps of bringing your vision to life?

Monica: We’d love for you to come out to our pop-ups and support our local businesses that are helping us out here. Buy our merch. We love to see people in the wild wearing our merch. 

Rachel: Our merch is on our website too, so you can buy it online. 

Monica: Absolutely. We do still have a Kickstarter going. Starting a business isn’t easy or cheap, so every little bit helps, and that money is going directly to funding The Dub so we really appreciate all of that. Just keep watching women’s sports. Go to your local games. Go to the Big 12 tournament, go to Current games

Rachel: Talk about women’s sports.

Monica: Yes, talk about women’s sports. Tell your best friend or tell your dad who may not be watching women’s sports. It will continue to grow and explode, I think, for many, many years to come. We want women’s sports to be in the same conversation as men’s sports always, and so we just have to keep talking about it. 

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