I came across The Dub while scrolling Instagram one night. Their mission is to be a safe & inclusive hub where fans of women's sports can watch, cheer on, & rally around their favorite teams & athletes. Their vision is to be Kansas City's go-to spot for watching women's sports. After poking around their site, I knew I needed to chat with the owners to learn more. I’m thankful that Rachel Glenn, who co-owns The Dub with her wife Monica, agreed to chat.

We started by talking about her relationship to women’s sports, and I asked if she’d always been a fan. When Rachel met Monica, she also met women’s soccer. “Seeing her get so excited about it made me kind of fall in love with the sport,” she told me.

It wasn’t the sport itself that hooked Rachel at first. It was watching someone she loved be so devoted. Fandom can be contagious in that way. Sometimes you find a world through a person, and sometimes a person becomes your first channel into a world.

Within a few years, she had memorized the team’s roster and lore, and she and Monica traveled to France for the 2019 Women’s World Cup, attending the quarterfinals, semifinals, and final. That trip changed something.

When they came home, it was hard to find that feeling again. There wasn’t anywhere to go to watch women’s sports surrounded by other fans. “Even if we could find a bar that would put the game on, the sound was never on,” she said. “I’d never watched a women’s game with the sound on.”

That silence, she realized, was the real barrier. It planted the seed for what would become The Dub.

When they decided to open The Dub, Kansas City was already buzzing with momentum. “The second we got down here, it just felt right,” Rachel said. “Kansas City has such a sports community already. The city supports those teams really well.”

The Dub quickly became part of that landscape. Even before opening, they hosted pop-ups at local bars and sold merch to fundraise. “We’ve had nothing but support,” she said. “Every single day someone comes in and tells us how long they’ve been waiting and how thankful they are.”

That gratitude crosses generations. “We’ve had a lot of parents bring their kids in and just say thank you,” she said. “I just want young women and young girls to start visualizing a different reality for themselves.”

That, she told me, is the why.

“When I was growing up, I loved being an athlete,” she said. “I think I probably could have wanted more of a life of sports, or I would have thought about it if it was a realistic pathway for me. But I never saw anything on TV. There was no path for me.”

At The Dub, those paths are visible on every screen. They play basketball, soccer, volleyball, rugby, hockey, swimming, even college games. And they play men’s sports, too! But they will always prioritize women’s sports.

Despite their passion and persistence, streaming women’s sports is still surprisingly difficult. Even in 2025. Women’s sports and their fans have suffered over the years, not from a lack of talent or passion but from a lack of channel, both literally and figuratively. You cannot fall in love with something you cannot see or hear. You cannot build a fandom without access to its lore.

“Out of everything we’ve gone through to get this place open, streaming has been and still is the most challenging part,” Rachel said. It is not as simple as plugging in a Roku and opening ESPN+. Bars are required to use commercial streaming licenses, which not only cost hundreds of dollars a month but also come with restricted access. “We have about ten percent of the games that are actually on ESPN+,” she explained. “We can’t increase viewership until we put them on TV, but we can’t put them on TV until viewership increases. It’s a puzzle.”

By the time The Dub pays for ESPN+, cable, and EverPass (which holds the rights to the NWSL, Premier League, and Thursday Night Football), the total reaches nearly half their rent. And yet, Rachel said, “That’s why we do it. Because the more places that can do this, the more money that’s out there, and hopefully it becomes more accessible.”

It’s ironic. The hardest part of creating a women’s sports bar isn’t the design, staffing, or menu. It’s access. The very thing they are trying to share still isn’t readily available to them. But they’re doing it and the orbit is growing strong.

Hearing a women’s sports broadcast across a bar is an experience that was nearly impossible only a few years ago. At The Dub, fans do not have to ask for the channel or justify their interest. It is the default.

But the work behind it is constant. Rachel and Monica still have full-time jobs s it’s important to them that they train staff to build connection intentionally. They tell their team, “If you see somebody sitting alone, figure out if they want to be engaged. Introduce them casually to someone else. Start a conversation, even across the bar.”

That approach comes naturally to Rachel. Her full-time job is running the restorative justice program for Kansas City Public Schools. “I’m very passionate about building community and conflict resolution,” she said. “My mind is always in event planning and community-building mode.”

In fandom, people often talk about finding their people. Sometimes you have to build the place where your people can find each other.

That is what Rachel and Monica did.

They built the channel. And the sound is finally on.