The Story Behind Bottle Top

We’re Mahoney and Georgette — two friends who’ve spent more evenings than we can count talking sports, and who finally decided to do something with all that talk.

For both of us, sports have never been background noise. They’re the games, the stats, the storylines, the arguments that keep going long after the final whistle. And somewhere in all those conversations — breaking down what happened, chewing over what it meant, finding the people who wanted to dig in as much as we did — we figured out two things: this is where we’ve found some of our favorite community, and the sports-talk world didn’t quite have a seat for the way we wanted to do it. So we built one.

A little about the two of us. Jen is the one who can talk about any sport, any story, at any hour — the kind of fan who turns a box score into a two-hour conversation, and decided to carve out a spot for herself in the sports talk world. Georgette comes at it as someone who has built community for a living: she owns The Barber Collective, an LGBTQIA+ inclusive barbershop in Tacoma that she started in her garage in 2020 and grew into a place where everyone gets a seat and nobody has to explain themselves. She’s also tied into the women’s sports scene close to home through the shop. Between us, we’ve got the obsession and the instinct for building something people actually want to belong to.

That’s really what Bottle Top is about. More than a podcast, we’re building a community — a place where all sports get celebrated, every league gets cheered on to grow, and women’s and LGBTQ fans know the room was built with them in mind. That’s not a tagline for us. It’s just how we’ve both always done things.

The show lives as a video podcast, a weekly newsletter, mailbags where your questions make the episode, watch parties, live events, and merch we’re proud to put our name on. But at the center of all of it is the same simple idea: pull up a chair. There’s room for you here.

— Jen & Georgette