ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - On Friday, Atlanta’s first women’s sports bar opened to a crowd and a line out the door.
“There’s not a place like this. There’s not a place for women’s sports, for women’s sports fans to gather, and celebrate, and trash talk, and strategize, and dream, and that doesn’t exist here,” said Jolene Jolene owner Chelsea Fishman.
Now it does. Jolene Jolene opened Friday at 3 p.m. as part of a residency at Pullman Yards.
“It is so much more than a sports bar,” said Leslie Dupree, visiting from Marietta.
“Community is everything. Not everybody has an opportunity for a safe space like this. I grew up in rural south Georgia. There’s nothing like this there,” she said.
Fishman said after the success of roughly 30 pop-up watch parties of women’s sports, she said it was time to take a risk to open Jolene Jolene.
“Everything new is a gamble, but I’m not scared of it,” she said, on the bar’s patio Friday afternoon.
She said her residency at Pullman Yards is open-ended, but was meant to potentially propel her business to grow into its own space at another location.
Jolene Jolene, named after the iconic Dolly Parton song and Fishman’s cat, will often feature Atlanta’s women’s professional sports teams, the Atlanta Dream and the Atlanta Vibe on its TVs and programming.
“Now that we can turn on a TV to actually watch them play, its time that we have a place that does that,” she said.
That being said, Fishman said they will also air national and international women’s sports.
The first game on the TVs Friday is Germany vs. Poland, in the UEFA Women’s Euro Cup.
It was not lost on Fishman that the city’s first women’s sports bar opened as the country celebrated Independence Day.
“There is something poetic about it for sure - in that women stepping into this freedom, this freedom that we’ve been fighting for always, and in this case it happens to be in sports,” Fishman said.
Jolene Jolene is open Wednesdays to Sundays at Pullman Yards in Kirkwood.
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