Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich met playing soccer together for the San Francisco Spikes, an LGBTQ+ soccer club. They bonded over their shared struggle to find a bar to watch the WNBA, Bay FC, or any other women’s sports game.
“You would call places ahead of time, and you would get answers like, ‘What is that?’” says Yergovich.
That will soon change. Rikki’s, a new sports bar dedicated to playing women’s sports, will open at 2223 Market St. in the Castro, Thoe and Yergovich announced today. It will start service sometime in the spring. Copas, a Mexican restaurant, closed at the same location in April, according to Eater San Francisco.
Rikki’s is named after Rikki Streicher, the legendary community activist, owner, and operator of three long-since-shuttered lesbian bars in the city: Maud’s, Amelia’s, and Olive Oil’s Bar and Grill. Streicher also helped found the Gay Games, a worldwide event in which athletes compete in an Olympic-style event that celebrates sexual diversity in sports.
To commemorate their opening, Thoe and Yergovich plan on purchasing new signs for Rikki Streicher field, a small expanse of a baseball field tucked in the Eureka Valley. They’ve already helped install a dripline for plants, and plan to continue tending the park in honor of Streicher’s memory.
Maud’s and Amelia’s, two of Streicher’s most popular lesbian bars, were gathering places for queer women in San Francisco from the late sixties into the nineties. Originally discreetly referred to as “The Study,” Maud’s was open 365 days a year so that patrons could come in at any time of the year and have a family with whom to celebrate the holidays. “Building that kind of space, that’s a hub for people to come together is really important to us,” says Thoe.
Now is the perfect time to launch a bar focused on women’s sports, the two owners say. For the past couple of years, streaming platforms, and even cable TV, have made watching women’s sports more accessible. A new fanbase, especially surrounding the WNBA, has exploded.
Momentum continues to build with the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries’ move to San Francisco’s Chase Center in 2025. At a number of packed prelaunch parties hosted by Thoe and Yergovich to watch women’s sports games, held at venues across the city, supporters have shown up donning Valkyries T-shirts, and the excitement is palpable. Fans, huddled together in groups, clutch beers and stare intently at the screen, erupting into cheers and leaping from their seats at the score of a goal.
“I’ve never been in a room with two hundred people watching the same women’s sporting event, and all cheering and groaning and gasping at the same time,” said Thoe after one watch party for the WNBA Finals announced just 36 hours before it began. “That’s special, the feeling that everybody else here is a part of this. That’s the feeling we want people to be able to find.”
At that event, hosted at Standard Deviant Brewing, attendees spilled out onto the sidewalk. Some had traveled across the Bay. Another celebrated a birthday.
Thoe, who works in real estate and housing, and Yergovich, who is in marketing, are fundraising for Rikki’s through WeFunder, a crowdfunding site that enables places like Rikki’s to repay donors over the years through earned revenue. They are nearly two-thirds of the way to their fundraising goal of $425,000.
The co-owners grew up dedicated sports players and found community in their teammates, many of whom have donated to Rikki’s and regularly show up to their watch parties. However, Yergovich says she deeply felt the lack of representation for athletes that looked like her, unless it was at the Olympics. At the watch parties Thoe and Yergovich have held, they have created a sense of belonging long before Rikki’s is set to open. “There’s this visceral reaction of, this is a place where there are people like me,” says Yergovich. “We can hang out, and there’s so, so many of them.”
You can find out about Rikki’s prelaunch watch parties here.
Pretty niche objective. Hosting watch parties in a private residence and creating a business of that model will be a challenge.
This looks extremely fun!!!
This is awesome! Looking forward to catching some Valks games there!
I am super pumped for this bar to open! It is really amazing to imagine being in a space dedicated to female athletes and lesbians! Adult human females have been excluded from their own categories in sports and spaces due to males invading these areas, so I hope this bar INCLUDES females. Every other bar has plenty of space for males.
See you women at the bar!!
It’s dedicated to female SPORTS. It’s not dedicated to lesbianism. Not all women who play sports are lesbians nor are all prospective fans of womens’ sports women, nor lesbians. You are failing the test of inclusivity you seek in the world and trying to hijack an entire inclusiveness movement for own personal interests. If the irony of this is not entirely lost on you, perhaps you should think a bit and rephrase? There are bars dedicated to lesbians where you can avoid males, high five yourself whatever, but this is much more inclusive than you seem to want. Men are allowed here. If that’s a big turn off, well, that’s your hang up I suppose. We’ll bee seeing you women AND fellas at the bar, thanks!
Well played!
How deliberately uninclusive of 50% of the population? Nicely done. Here we have a story about a venue celebrating womens’ sports and you have to make it a single gender issue, really? That’s not winning hearts and minds.