Babe’s Sports Bar: A New Clubhouse For Women’s Sports Set To Open Soon In Chicago

On a quiet stretch of Armitage Avenue in Logan Square, a long-empty bar is getting a second life. Once known for dark walls and heavy curtains, the space is being transformed into something entirely new: Babe’s Sports Bar, a women’s sports bar where female athletes are the focus, not the footnote. Set to open around Labor Day 2025, Babe’s aims to be a welcoming, intentional gathering place for fans who are tired of asking bartenders to change the channel, and for anyone who’s ever wished sports bars felt a little more like home.

Babe’s is the work of two former college rugby co-captains, Nora McConnell-Johnson and Torra Spillane. Their mission is both radical and obvious: create a bar where women’s sports are not background noise, but rather the main event.

“I think so much of this world was designed by and for men, and this is a bar for women’s sports. My realtor’s gay. My brand manager is a queer woman,” McConnell-Johnson, who is also gay, told Block Club Chicago last year. “I’m trying to rethink for myself what a bar should be and what we want the space to be.”

This rethinking starts from the ground up—literally. Memorabilia, collected by bar owners from the community, will be displayed through epoxied tabletops and a communal trophy shelf. Sports memorabilia, like keychains, pins, and erasers, are set into the bar under a layer of epoxy. A memorial to the players, fans, and forgotten moments that rarely make it onto the walls of mainstream sports bars.

McConnell-Johnson calls the project “a middle finger to the traditional sports bar.” She’s working with a local designer, Ilyana Schwartz, who is a friend of Babe’s, to create a beautiful and intentional space for the community to gather, watch sports, or grab a post-practice drink. Upgrades are planned to ensure the air in the bar follows the guidelines from the Clean Air Club, cementing the bar’s focus on thoughtfulness and accessibility. 

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There are women’s sports bars now in Portland and Minneapolis, in New York and Seattle. Philadelphia will soon have two if all goes according to plan. Chicago already has one, the beloved Whiskey Girl Tavern in Edgewater, but Babe’s will bring something different. Not just a second option, but a different vision.

McConnell-Johnson imagines something brighter, futurist, built around a simple but persistent question: What if Babe Didrikson Zaharias wasn’t an exception?

That’s the bar’s namesake. Zaharias was an all-around phenom in the 1930s and ’40s, dominating track and field, golf, basketball, and even baseball. She’s the only athlete to win individual Olympic medals in running, throwing, and jumping events. And yet, outside of a few dusty textbooks and niche museums, her story is rarely told.

“The way I’m envisioning the space is like, ‘What if she wasn’t an exception?’” McConnell-Johnson told the Windy City Times. “What if she was the norm of athletes, and women like her were celebrated and able to access sports at a high level, ever since the ‘30s and ‘40s? It feels like a futurist project.”

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It’s personal for McConnell-Johnson. In high school, she captained an all-boys soccer team, an experience that taught her what it means to be visibly different in a male-dominated space, and how threatening that can feel to others.

Her passion for women’s sports deepened when she moved to Chicago and started coaching rugby at the University of Chicago. Fun fact: She actually led the team to their first-ever national championship in her first year of coaching! Watching, not just playing, became part of her life. Then, in 2021, came the moment that crystallized her next move: the Chicago Sky won the WNBA championship, and McConnell-Johnson found herself begging for one TV with sound at a local bar.

That frustration turned into momentum. She talked to friends, to fellow sports fans, to Whiskey Girl owners, to queer DJs, to city planners, to designers. She reached out to the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Foundation, eventually getting in touch with Zaharias’s only living relative, Dr. George Grimes. He loved the idea and helped her secure naming rights.

“He called her Auntie Babe and thinks she’s such a badass, so it’s really cool to have this,” she said.

Babe’s isn’t quite open yet, but the goal is clear: to create a space where women’s sports are truly celebrated and fans can gather without compromise. Sounds like a grand slam.

Follow Babe’s on Instagram (@babesinchicago) or visit their website for updates.