As a lifelong athlete, Clarissa Flores knows a thing or two about being a part of a team. Now, the Northwestern University basketball player turned hospitality executive wants to leverage all that experience in her new business.
Level Up Sporting Club is slated to open at 3343 N. Clark St the first week of May. With this project, Flores hopes to build a space which celebrates women’s sports and makes community members feel like “family.”
The idea to open a location in Wrigleyville came to Flores about two and a half years ago. She knew how important location would be for a new business after working in hospitality for nearly two decades, so she partnered with multiple realtors and looked at a number of spaces. Nothing was speaking to her.
A little while into the searching process, Ashleen Bracey, women’s basketball head coach at University of Illinois Chicago, gave her a call. Flores met with Bracey the next day about working with Bracey’s real estate broker fiancee—former basketball player Janae Smith.
Flores sent a photo of a place she’d seen in the commercial pages to Smith that night. Within two days, she saw it in person—it was perfect.
As a queer Latina owner of a women’s sports-geared bar, Flores said she’s “taking her seat at the table” of Wrigleyville’s bar scene. Although there are other entertainment hot spots around Chicago, to her, Wrigleyville is “the O.G.”
“I’m not looking to be on the sidelines,” Flores said. “I’m looking to be dead center of the entertainment corridor where I belong.”
The space’s remodel is scheduled to be done within the next two weeks, and then she’ll “be at the mercy of the city” as to when it’ll receive the liquor license.
Flores’ community is represented in the investor team behind Level Up as well, which consists completely of queer women who played college sports, such as Bracey.
One of the main missions of Flores’ career has been to uplift underserved communities. She’s the owner of Lesbian Social Club in Chicago and Dirty Matriarch in Detroit. She tries to do events all over the country, not just for queer people, but for women’s sports as well.
Flores said she’s wanted to do something specifically for her communities her entire hospitality career, coming together at Level Up Sporting Club. But she also wants to encourage allies and any fans to come there—”if you’re a supporter of women’s sports, you belong at Level.”
After she graduated from Northwestern, Flores didn’t know what she wanted to do, but she wanted to do something that was her own. She started out by getting her real estate license, then working with a developer friend. She opened one office, then another, and then the opportunity to jump into hospitality came in 2005.
She got involved in the industry through a close friend’s husband—he worked in a high-level area of the entertainment industry and was looking to buy a property in Logan Square with an investor, which ended up being her. Twenty years later, she’s worked her way up to be director of operations at Tao Group Hospitality.
Being an athlete is an integral part of Flores’ life—the lessons she learned through sports still guide her today.
“I say this often and I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: My whole life is indebted to the game of basketball,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the game, I wouldn’t be here now. Every opportunity, every door that opened is because of the game of basketball.”
One of those main lessons is how to play as a team. Flores said she has around 200 people working for her and she doesn’t consider them staff, but teammates.
“I’m that leader that doesn’t sit in the wagon while they’re pulling it, I’m pulling the wagon with them,” she said, “It’s just been my mantra my whole life.”
That mentality bleeds into how she sees other women’s sports bars around the city—if one opened up right by her, she said she would be happy. She said she values collaboration over competition in all areas of her life and sees the rising support for women’s sports as a “cultural and marketplace shift.”
In 1997, Flores played her high school championship game for Whitney Young in front of what she estimates to have been around 7,000 people. She said women’s sports have always had the support, but now they’re gaining visibility.
“From my end, building this infrastructure here in Level Up Sporting Club is one of the first steps,” she said. “I’m investing in women’s sports, I’m not investing in a sports bar … I’m investing in a community because I believe in it—I believe women’s sports can carry a business.”
When people walk into her new space, she wants them to feel like part of something. Flores said decades in the industry have shown her how important it is to make people feel like they belong, and so she hopes to build a strong sense of togetherness at Level Up.
“I’m building a community, and hopefully that’s something that can set us apart,” she said. “Everyone that walks through that door will be family. My ultimate goal and purpose is to build a community.”