In the heart of Logan Square, trophies line the wooden ledge opposite a long bar top. Circular tables are filled with flat physical ephemera—team photos, varsity patches, medals and pins, stickers, blue ribbons, baseball cards, bag tags, and more from childhood soccer games, college team-captain years, and assorted memories of former or amateur athletehood for women in the Chicago area.
Babe’s sports bar owner Nora McConnell-Johnson explained that most of these trophies and other memorabilia came out of people’s storage as the bar prepared to open in September of this year. The nation’s newest women’s sports bar has made a personal investment in their community by dusting off forgotten souvenirs, remnants of childhood athletic dreams, no longer deemed valuable even by their original owners, and putting them on display. The objects remind patrons of the important role sports play in young women’s lives, while also eliminating the distance between the merit of professionalized sports and community-based sports.
“To be a women’s sports fan, odds are you share a lot of the same values,” Nora said.
Nora and her co-founder Torra Spillane were co-captains of their college rugby team. Babe’s was an abstract idea Nora says she had been talking over for a while, but more of something she hoped someone else would do so she could be a customer. Then in 2024, Torra and her husband, who live in New York, approached Nora about making the bar a reality by coming on as silent partners.
On September 27th, only a year after they began crowdfunding, Babe’s opened their doors.
“People are so friendly to each other here. A lot of people meet each other and make friends here. [At] grand opening, people were just swapping Instagrams left and right, it was really cool. And I think it speaks to the fact that this is a group of people who have not been served by the market, and so they have been denied the ability to connect before this in a lot of ways,” Nora said.
The camaraderie at Babe’s starts and ends with loving women’s sports, but it would be impossible to overlook the prominence of queer communities within the women’s sports sphere and at Babe’s.
“…women’s sports would not exist if it weren’t for lesbians, and lesbians tend to make up most of women’s sports fandom, a disproportionate chunk of it, compared to the general population,” Nora said.
According to PBS, there were at least 200 lesbian bars in America. By 2021, there were only 21. Today there are 38 lesbian bars according to the Lesbian Bar Project, which defines what makes a bar “uniquely Lesbian” is a “prioritization of creating space for people of marginalized genders including women (regardless if they are cis or trans), non-binary folks, and trans men. As these spaces aim to be inclusive of all individuals across the diverse LGBTQIA+ community, the label Lesbian belongs to all people who feel that it empowers them.”
Nora and Torra have discussed the distinction between a women’s sports bar and a lesbian bar, but they are aligned on the fact that Babe’s is explicitly the former.
“There are a lot of times I’ll look around, I’ll be like, ‘Damn, we like, we look like a lesbian bar,’ which is great, I love that,” Nora said.
But despite this, she is determined to steer away from insularity.
“A lot of our bartenders don’t use she/her pronouns, but they keep getting she/her-ed because we’re a women’s sports bar, so I have pronoun pins coming for us,” Nora said. “Helping [our patrons] understand gender in this space, too, is something that I really want us to be good at.”
Nora believes intentionality is a pillar to how Babe’s operates, so it has a hard line of playing women’s sports only.
“We don’t play men’s sports period,” Nora said, “which is not how all of the women’s sports bars are. I actually think it’s becoming more and more rare, which I find problematic.”
Despite some female patrons wanting to watch male sports, Nora believes the policy is imperative to de-centering men and creating an inclusive space for all identities.
“I just was having an interesting conversation last night with a couple, a straight couple who was here, and the guy was like, ‘She’s been begging me to come, but I didn’t think it was gonna be a space that I would be wanted in.’ And so I was saying, ‘No, anyone who wants to be part of a women’s sports community can come here,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, it does feel nice. It feels really nice in here.’ And I was like ‘Yeah, no one likes toxic masculinity. It’s not good for any of us. Welcome to the fight, sir,’” Nora laughed.
In their first three months, Babe’s has proved they are dedicated to more than showing games and serving drinks. They’ve demonstrated that they are committed to taking on ambitious partnerships with professional women’s sports teams, which is further integrating Babe’s within the fabric of Chicago’s women’s sports culture.
On October 2nd, Babe’s hosted Chicago Stars players Sam Staab and Alyssa Naeher as guest bartenders for the night, in a series of events kicking off the bar’s opening. The night was huge for Stars fans who “don’t get to be in community with each other often,” Nora said. While Chicago is a sports city, Babe’s isn’t a sports bar outside Seat Geek Stadium in Bridgeview with direct access to pre- or post-game buzz, so they have to create their own.
Babe’s has also hosted several events for their partnership with Chicago’s premiere roller derby team, the Windy City Rollers, and sponsored the Chicago Winds‘ Women’s National Football Conference player Shana Sumers. Next year, they have plans to partner with the Chicago Tempest Women’s Elite Rugby Team, as well as the PWHL for their upcoming Takeover Tour, and hope to collaborate with local college teams.
Babe’s is using the relative accessibility of professional women’s sports teams to enrich the experiences of their patrons and celebrate these women’s teams directly. Outside of sports, Babe’s hosts community parties, acts as a drop site for Logan Square/Avondale food pantries, and is committed to finding more ways for patrons to be politically active. Just last week, Babe’s hosted the “26th Ward Night Out” alongside Alderman Jessie Fuentes.
The recent shift of women’s sports to the forefront of American culture demands an overhaul in the ways we’ve previously understood, enjoyed, and celebrated sports. It calls for a change of venue and host—a call that Babe’s has eagerly answered. They aren’t just proving that women’s sports fans are willing to show up for their favorite players and teams—they’re proving that they are capable of creating and fostering a community that hasn’t always been catered to.
With a dedication to diversity, extracurricular events, and celebrating their patrons as much as those broadcasted across their eight TVs, Babe’s gleams with potential for its future impact in sports-city Chicago.
