Two titans of women’s soccer, Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach, recently made a trip to Long Beach — to celebrate the launch of their new podcast, which will also feature frequent appearances from another hometown legend — at a recently opened, one-of-a-kind local sports bar.
The pair visited Watch Me! Sports Bar, located on Pacific Coast Highway across the street from the 2nd & PCH shopping center, on Friday, Oct. 11. The sports bar celebrated its grand opening — and the start of a new kind of sports bar — in July.
Watch Me! is the first bar in California that’s focused specifically on showing, highlighting and celebrating women’s sports. Its co-owners, Jackie Diener and Megan Eddy — who go by “Jax” and “Emme” — said previously their goal is to “celebrate achievements by women who continuously break barriers in the sports world and beyond.”
That guiding tenet made Watch Me! a perfect choice for Friday’s event with Foudy and Wambach, whose new podcast “Welcome to the Party,” has a similar goal.
The show, which launched in September, features interviews with other iconic leaders in women’s sports. Their first episode, published on Thursday, Sept. 4, had retired track and field star Allyson Felix on as a guest. Felix, a six-time Olympic gold medal winner, is the most decorated track and field athlete — woman or man — in Olympic history, having earned 11 medals from five Olympics.
“I just want to be a part of women’s sports, and this is the perfect place, you know — the first women’s sports bar in California to open,” Wambach said in a Friday interview. “And now, you’re seeing all these women’s sports bars all over the country opening. It’s my goal and dream to get to every single one of them and do something like this there, because (it would be so) exciting to tap into (what) all the smaller regional communities that are excited about.”
Abby Wambach takes questions while promoting the new podcast, “Welcome to the Party,” at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From right, Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach take questions while promoting their new podcast, “Welcome to the Party,” at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From left, Lindsay and Caitlin Lowe attend a Q&A with women’s soccer legends Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From left, Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy take questions while promoting their new podcast, “Welcome to the Party,” at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From left, Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy take questions while promoting their new podcast, “Welcome to the Party,” at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
Erica Curry asks a question during a Q&A with women’s soccer legends Abby Wambach and Julie Foudy at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From right, Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach take questions while promoting their new podcast, “Welcome to the Party,” at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
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Abby Wambach takes questions while promoting the new podcast, “Welcome to the Party,” at the Watch Me Sports Bar in Long Beach on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
And the excitement at Watch Me! was palpable Friday afternoon, with around a hundred fans gathering in the courtyard outside the bar to hear Wambach and Foudy speak about their new podcast and get the crowd ready to watch game four of the WNBA finals between the Las Vegas Aces and Phoenix Mercury. The Aces defeated the Mercury 97-86 to complete a four-game sweep to win the title.
“We feel when we’re with y’all, that there’s hope and there’s light and there’s inclusion, and there’s all these good things in the world that we should be shouting at the rooftops about,” Foudy said during the Q&A, “and we find our best selves when we’re around people who love women’s sports. And so we wanted to talk about it more and share that with you all — the party people.”
Podcast guests, so far, have included tennis icon and recent U.S. Open winner Aryna Sabalenka, basketball star Breanna Stewart, fellow USWNT legend Alex Morgan, WNBA titan Sue Bird, NBC sports broadcaster Rebecca Lowe, and more.
There’s one more thing about “Welcome to the Party” that’s sure to delight Long Beach residents: It’ll regularly feature appearances from Billie Jean King, Long Beach’s tennis icon and staunch advocate for gender equality.
King, a graduate of Poly High School whose roots in Long Beach run deep, fell in love with tennis at 11, when she bought her first racket and told her mother she was going to become the No. 1 tennis player in the world.
She lived up to that expectation, and throughout her 81 years, she has also been a pioneer in the women’s rights movement, an LGBTQ+ champion and a leading figure in the fight for pay equity for women.
Besides her work in sports and advocacy, King is also a lover of books and her hometown city’s public libraries — making her a perfect namesake for Long Beach’s Billie Jean King Main Library in downtown, which was named in the legend’s honor in 2019.
Foudy and Wambach, similarly, are no strangers to the sports history books — each with remarkably storied careers of their own. Foudy, a two-time FIFA World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist, retired from the U.S. Women’s National Team in 2024 with 274 international caps under her belt.
In 1997, she was the first American and first woman to get the FIFA Fair Play Award, which celebrates “exemplary fair play behavior, either on or off the pitch in relation to an official football match, including matches in amateur leagues,” according to the organization’s website.
Notably, Foudy was a key member of the USWNT’s legendary 99ers squad — which won the 1999 World Cup against China in front of more than 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
The final match for that World Cup was, and still is, regarded as one of the most important and influential games in U.S. women’s soccer history — capturing the attention of millions, helping to legitimize professional women’s sports and inspiring generations of young women to pursue their athletic talents seriously.
The momentum from that World Cup win, according to ESPN, helped USWNT players establish the first professional women’s soccer league in the U.S., negotiate their first collective bargaining agreement and, most importantly, carved out a real and tangible path for other women with dreams of becoming professional players.
Those strides for women’s soccer bolstered by the 99ers squad and their incredible World Cup victory led to the establishment of the Women’s United Soccer Association in 2001. Though that endeavor only lasted a few years, it laid crucial groundwork for professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. — and without it, it’s unlikely that the now successful National Women’s Soccer League would exist.
Foudy, since her retirement, has remained active in the women’s soccer world. She’s an advocate for women’s equality in sports, she’s been inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame, written books, appeared in documentaries, launched a sports leadership academy, and recently ended her two-decade career as a sports broadcaster and soccer analyst with ESPN.
That’s one of the things she had in common with King — who Foudy lovingly refers to as “The Kinger” — when they first met at a women’s sports roundtable back in the 1990s.
“Billie was telling her story about women’s tennis breaking away from men’s tennis and forming their own tour, and how hard that was. I’d been on the national team for, like, seven, eight years, and we were having similar issues,” Foudy said in an interview. “And so I said to her, Billie, all your issues are our issues — what should we do? We’re not getting any movement from the U.S. Soccer Federation. And she was like, ‘Foudy — what are you doing about it?’”
King, who was the catalyst for the women’s sports equal pay movement, held other leaders in women’s sports accountable, Foudy said, making sure that their action and advocacy was aligned, active and consistent throughout the years.
“We were fighting for equitable pay back in the day, and more resources, more marketing, more support and more staffing and all those things, but (Billie) was the one who was always like, let’s go. Here’s where we are. This is what we need to do,” Foudy said. “She’s the thread that runs through all women’s sports.”
Wambach’s USWNT career, both on and off the pitch, was equally influential — and she and Foudy even played together on the national team for a few years at the start of her career. Wambach earned her first cap for the USWNT in 2001, kicking off a yearslong career that she’d eventually leave as the USWNT’s highest goal scorer of all-time (a record she still holds to this day), with one FIFA World Cup win and two Olympic gold medals with the USWNT.
She’s also a member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame, and won the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award six times throughout her career. FIFA named her World Player of the Year in 2012, making her the first woman athlete to receive the honor in 10 years.
Besides her international career, Wambach played in every iteration of the professional women’s soccer leagues — including the Women’s United Soccer Association, then later the Women’s Professional Soccer and, finally, in the NSWL with the Western New York Flash.
Wambach — like King and Foudy — has been a staunch advocate for women’s sports throughout her life. She spoke out against unfair and unequal treatment of women athletes, participating in legal action against FIFA for mandating artificial turf fields during the 2015 World Cup, for example. And later in her career, she joined the fight for pay equity in women’s soccer.
Shortly after Foudy’s conversation about equal pay advocacy in the ’90s, she and the USWNT engaged in a contract dispute with the U.S. Soccer Federation. In fact, Foudy and the team were set to sign a contract the very next day — but after her talk with King, she was able to persuade her team to hold out for something better.
“The next day, we were signing contracts — and I was like, Billie Jean King told me, and then we didn’t sign the contract,” Foudy said, “and that was the first, like, major blow up.”
A few weeks later, the Federation folded, and the USWNT succeeded in securing a better, more equitable contract for their players. Decades later, after unending effort by the women who make the sport what it is, the USWNT finally achieved pay equity for its players through a landmark legal win against the U.S. Soccer Federation in 2022 — which included $24 million in back pay for the players and a commitment from the organization to pay men and women players equally moving forward.
“These are the stories they told me when I first got on the national team. So people wonder why (there’s) so much love and heart and passion for women’s soccer for the national team, and it’s because, how could I not?” Wambach said. “I got to play after these legends played — and they got to play after Billie played. We just keep helping each other, generation after generation.”
Now, years out from their professional soccer careers, Foudy and Wambach are continuing their lifelong efforts to bolster gender equality in sports with their “Welcome to the Party” podcast — and by supporting the local bars’ efforts to do the same.
And that’s how, the pair hopes, women will continue to get the treatment, community and respect they deserve — both on and off the field.