{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Danielle Thoe, Sara Yergovich, and Rikki\u2019s, Part 1 (S8E11)","description":"San Francisco has a women\u2019s sports bar! In this episode, meet Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich. Together, they own and operate Rikki\u2019s, a women\u2019s sports bar on Market in the Castro. We\u2019ll hear from Danielle and Sara about their early lives and how they made their way to San Francisco and became friends. We\u2019ll also hear the story of why and how they opened The City\u2019s first women\u2019s sports bar, as well as the incredible woman they named it for. Most importantly, both Sara and Danielle (and me, Jeff) are Libras \ud83d\ude09. We start with Danielle. She grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Born in 1990, her earliest memories are mid-Nineties, and she was around 10 when Y2K happened. Soccer was huge in Danielle\u2019s life, starting around age 6. She sites the US Women\u2019s Team winning the World Cup in 1999 as a profound influence in her life. It was the first time she\u2019d seen women\u2019s sports generate that level of excitement, and she was hooked. She continued playing into her high school years, and says that it was around this time that she started noticing how good some of the other players in her soccer club had gotten. Because Danielle\u2019s high school was so large (6,000 or so students), she set her sights on a \u201cbig\u201d university. It was between Michigan and Indiana universities, and she choose Indiana, whose state college is in Bloomington. In her college years, Danielle didn\u2019t really play soccer. Instead, dorm life because a central focus. She landed in the Collins Living-Learning Center, which she describes as \u201ca weird, niche, hippie place,\u201d and she loved it. There was space for many different kinds of people and activities, including pottery and bicycle racing, something Danielle took up in her time at college. I\u2019ve never lived in a college dorm, and probably never will. But this place sounds rad. The dorm also allowed young Danielle a certain freedom she hadn\u2019t yet experienced. I\u2019d call it freedom of expression today. Back then, it was the ability to be as weird as she wanted. There would always be someone nearby a little more \u201cout there,\u201d no matter what. After Indiana, Danielle returned to her home state and went to grad school at the University of Michigan. While Ann Arbor, and through friends, she met and started dating someone from San Francisco. After Danielle got laid off from a job in Michigan, she decided to join her long-distance partner and move to The Bay. It was 2015. June 25 to be exact. We know this because the very next day was when the United States Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the country. We turn to Danielle\u2019s business partner, Sara, to hear her life story and how she got to San Francisco. Sara grew up in Benicia, across The Bay. Her parents met at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. After college, her dad joined the Navy and got stationed in Vallejo, where the young couple moved. Some years later, they settled in nearby Benicia and had five kids. Sara is their youngest. She\u2019s also her parents\u2019 only daughter. All her older siblings are boys. She owes getting into \u201call of the sports\u201d to that fact. Her mom signed Sara up for soccer when she was three. Through some kind of odd accident, her mom also inadvertently became the coach. Sara also played volleyball, basketball, baseball, tennis, golf \u2026 she was a jack of all trades, master of none,\u201d as she puts it. But Sara\u2019s mom always put her on boys\u2019 teams to make her more competitive, or so the thinking went. When her mom tried to put young Sara on a football team, though, she drew a line. In her high school years, being the only girl on a team came with specific sexist challenges. But for all the jerks who gave her shit, she was able to find boys who were cool, who had her back. She also eventually got a taste of revenge. The coach\u2019s son was particularly nasty, but his dad was cool and paired Sara up with the kid for catch before a game. Sara wound up and threw the baseball so hard, the kid cried. We Libras strive for balance. Sara came to San Francisco regularly as a kid, especially when out of town family visited. Eventually, her oldest brother (16 years older) moved to The City and she came to see him a lot. Another brother moved in with him and they lived in several apartments all over town. Sara shares her earliest memory of visiting SF. She remembers a high-rise penthouse and going to Chinatown. We end Part 1 with the time Sara left The Bay\u2014to go to college, first in Santa Barbara, then for her last semester in Kent in England. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Sara and Danielle. We recorded this episode at Rikki\u2019s in The Castro in January 2026. Photography by Marcella Sanchez ","author_name":"Storied: San Francisco","author_url":"http:\/\/www.storiedsf.com\/","html":"