Salem entrepreneurs test the limits of the Northwest’s passion for women’s sports

As Nina and Beth Freelander walk into Icarus Wings and Things in downtown Salem, they wave to the owners before taking a seat at a table near Nina’s signature on the wall.

As a member of a local rugby team, Nina was invited to sign the wall when Icarus opened in March. The gluten-free gourmet chicken wing restaurant is dedicated to supporting local women’s sports teams, including showing mostly women’s sports on the four TVs.

The Freelanders show up on this particular Friday to watch a National Women’s Soccer League playoff game.

“We actually don’t have the streaming service that shows this game because women’s sports are notoriously difficult to find on TV,” Beth Freelander said. “They’re not all on one platform, and so it’s nice to have a place where we can reliably go to watch the games that we want to see.”

Despite a lack of media coverage and a history of discrimination, sports marketing experts say the fan base for women’s sports is growing. And those fans are willing to pay to watch and support their teams. Meanwhile, business owners in Portland and Seattle garnered national attention when they opened up women’s sports bars that are proving successful. Now, four Salem entrepreneurs are experimenting with the concept outside of a major city – so far, with mixed results.

“The food’s really good and that brings some folks in,” said Icarus co-owner Aaron Gilliland. “And I think folks will come in for NWSL playoffs or certain things, but it’s just not enough to keep up with the numbers that you need throughout the year.”

On top of the challenges restaurants face when starting out — like getting the right permits, finding the best spot, raising funds, training and holding onto staff, and building a customer base — women’s sports bars face an additional hurdle. They need to figure out how to actually provide the entertainment customers are being promised: televised women’s sports.

“I knew that if we couldn’t get sports on the TV, we wouldn’t have a business,” said Jenny Nguyen, owner of the Sports Bra in Northeast Portland. It made national headlines when it opened in April 2022 as the first bar focusing on women’s sports.

“When we think about women’s sports coverage, up until about five years ago there would definitely not be enough access to have a sports bar,” Nguyen said.

Studies show that women’s sports traditionally made up less than 5% of all sports media coverage. It’s gotten a bit better in the last couple years, but Nguyen says it’s still not easy to find content.

Streaming platforms like Sling or Hulu are only meant for personal home use, she says, and networks that do offer business licenses don’t have dedicated women’s sports packages.

“At the beginning, I likened it to having a machete and chopping through a jungle to get access to women’s sports,” she said.

So Nguyen reached out to media companies and individual leagues like the WNBA for permission. That’s a blueprint the Rough and Tumble in Seattle also had to follow to get access to content, and eventually Icarus. Nguyen says the owners of the three establishments often exchange messages about how to get specific games or how to show content beyond major sports.

Figuring out how to actually show women’s sports on TV is part of why Nguyen says the Sports Bra has been such a success. Another reason, she says, is the location.

“If it doesn’t work in Portland, it will not work in any other city,” Nguyen said. “Guaranteed it was going to work here or nowhere else. I couldn’t have picked another city to launch.”

Nguyen was born and raised in Portland and has seen firsthand how the city supports women athletes, like high attendance at Thorns games.

Jen Barnes, owner of the Rough and Tumble in Seattle, said her bar, which is dedicated to having women’s sports on at least 50% of the time, has been a success for similar reasons. Seattle has well-supported professional women’s soccer and basketball teams, plus the University of Washington.

“I do think that it would be a little bit more challenging to do in a smaller town without a big sports team behind it,” Barnes said.

In contrast, Salem has no professional team and no major NCAA Division I school within city limits.

“When they [Icarus] said that they were opening in Salem, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s insane,’ but also, ‘Good for you. Go get ‘em,’” said Nguyen at the Sports Bra.

And go get ‘em they did. Icarus has four co-owners, including two-time James Beard-nominated chef Jonathan Jones. Together with Maura Ryan, Kelli Gilliland and Aaron Gilliland, the group crafted the idea of a gluten-free chicken wing restaurant focused on playing women’s sports.

“I got super excited seeing that The Sports Bra was opening up — that this is becoming something that people were talking about and excited about,” said Kelli Gilliland, who in addition to being a co-owner of Icarus is a former softball player at Willamette University. “I wanted to bring something like that here to Salem.”

Co-owners Jones and Ryan also own Salem’s Epilogue Kitchen, which used to be in the Icarus spot. When Epilogue moved to a bigger site a few doors down, it left an opening for Icarus. Jones, a self-proclaimed literary nerd, says the name was an intentional choice, drawing on the Greek myth of the inventor’s son who flew too close to the sun with wax wings.

Jones says while Icarus has garnered loyal regulars, it hasn’t gotten the same outpouring of support as its counterparts in Portland or Seattle.

“We are not as busy as we want to be,” he said. “At all.”

He thinks it’s a combination of things. The business opened just ahead of the traditionally slow summer months, and on top of that, downtowns are struggling to bounce back from the pandemic downturn.

“Because we’re also, unfortunately, limiting our customer base by the very nature of being both gluten-free and only showing women’s sports — which, that should not limit anybody,” Jones said. “But there’s a certain section of Salem, and it’s, I think, a disproportionately large percentage of the population, that views that as an unwelcome thing as opposed to the inclusive thing that it actually is.”

That’s a stereotype the larger women’s sports world continues to come up against. Follow nearly any social media post involving women athletes and there are likely negative comments suggesting “No one watches women’s sports.”

Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon, says it’s actually the opposite: Women’s sports are growing exponentially. Leagues are expanding. The WNBA is adding two teams for the 2025 season, with Portland in the running for one of those teams.

Helping to fuel that growth, she says, is the renegotiation of outdated media deals with major TV networks. Also, athletes individually are scoring big sponsorship deals and teams collectively are bringing in more money.

“Valuations are going up, viewership is going up, interest in the game is growing,” Anderson said. “And I think it’s just been a lot of aligning of the stars with everything happening at once.”

But Aaron Gilliland at Icarus worries they might have been too ambitious in choosing Salem, even though each owner feels dedicated to making downtown Salem a thriving and inclusive environment.

“At the end of the day, no matter what happens,” he said, “I think we all want to know if it doesn’t work out, at least we did what we could.”

Icarus has been adding events to the weekly line-up, like trivia on Sundays. The owners are inviting local middle and high school teams to use their space for team events. Icarus continues to build a base of regulars looking for gluten-free food, and like Beth and Nina Freelander, a place to watch the next big women’s sports match.

And while Icarus specializes in showing women’s sports, it makes two exceptions. Because the Gillilands are University of Oregon fans, Icarus shows Duck football games. The other is Philadelphia Eagles games because Jones, who is from Philadelphia, is a fan.

Jones says like any smart business, they regularly re-evaluate the endeavor.

“You set long-term goals and then you have short-term reality, and you sort of adjust your goals based on short-term reality,” he said. “So that’s kind of where we’re at — every new month, meeting and figuring out, ‘Okay, this worked, this didn’t work. How long can we do this? How long do we want to do this?’”

But for now, he says, they’re all in. They still want to run a place in Salem that does two things: serves gourmet chicken and vegan wings in a safe place for people who don’t eat gluten, and is an all-ages sports bar focused on women’s sports.

Co-owner Kelli Gilliland acknowledges a place like Icarus might be an ambitious idea for Salem. If the Sports Bra in Portland shows this idea can work somewhere, Icarus is testing the opposite.

“If we can be successful here in Salem,” she said, “It could be successful anywhere.”