Sky announce plans for $38 million training facility: ‘It’s not shared. This is ours.’

CHICAGO — The Chicago Sky will break ground this fall on a purpose-built training center, delivering on team ownership’s promise to provide exclusive player facilities.

The $38 million facility will be built in partnership with the Village of Bedford Park and located next to the Wintrust Sports Complex just south of Midway Airport. The Sky expect construction to be completed by December 2025 and the 40,000-square-foot facility to be fully available for the 2026 WNBA season.

For co-owner and operating chair Nadia Rawlinson, completion of this facility is a crucial step forward amid an era of rapid growth for women’s basketball.

“We aren’t derivative of anyone,” Rawlinson said. “We stand on our own two feet. We are an organization that has our own needs, wants, desires, goals and outcomes that we’re driving toward that are uniquely ours.

“It’s not a derivative of the guys. It’s not shared. This is ours. We are a professional women’s sports franchise that’s operating at the highest levels, and our facilities will reflect that.”

The new facility will have two regulation-sized courts, an improvement from the single court at the team’s current training facilities at Sachs Recreation Center in Deerfield. The new building also will include amenities such as individual lockers, strength and conditioning equipment, player lounges, recovery and film rooms and a private kitchen.

The facility site in Bedford Park is 11 miles from Wintrust Arena, where the Sky play their home games. That will significantly reduce the commute in comparison with Sachs, which is nearly 30 miles from Wintrust Arena.

The move will allow the Sky to relocate team-provided player apartments from Deerfield to downtown Chicago. Rawlinson said the franchise has not settled on a new location for player housing, but the South Loop is a primary target.

Relocating the training facility to the southwest suburbs also will allow the Sky to hone its focus on community outreach. The franchise will focus heavily on two new partnerships with the Obama Foundation and the YMCA of Metro Chicago as it expands into the communities surrounding Bedford Park and the South Loop.

Once completed, Sky players will have year-round, 24-hour access to the facility — an important provision for player development and recovery, two aspects of athlete care that the Sky and WNBA have been working to improve in recent seasons.

The facility also will include amenities to support player endeavors off the court, including beauty stations and a content creation studio.

“This is a player’s third place,” Rawlinson said. “Not only do they have their own place that they live or the place where they practice, this is a place where they can have their other parts of life exist too.”

Establishing an independent training facility became an acute focus for the Sky this year, both to improve the quality of care for current players and to allow the team to compete in free agency.

The Sky’s current training facility is run by the Deerfield Park District, and players walk past public Zumba and water aerobics classes on their way to the practice court. They can access the Sachs facilities only during regular hours of operation (5 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and must follow government holiday schedules.

As teams such as the Seattle Storm and Phoenix Mercury unveiled new stand-alone training facilities, the Sky struggled to compete on the free-agency market. Former Niles West standout Jewell Loyd cited the Sky’s outdated accommodations and a lack of spending as key factors informing her decision to re-sign with the Storm last offseason.

Rawlinson initially planned to make an announcement before the 2024 season started. But with an estimated completion date in late 2025, Rawlinson said the Sky are confident in their ability to meet rising expectations for player treatment across the WNBA.

“I would have wanted this to happen sooner, but the reality is there’s always things that you don’t know that come up when you go through these negotiations,” Rawlinson said. “The fact that we could have it within a year and a half is pretty extraordinary. It goes back to the dedication of our partners with Bedford Park, who were highly motivated to make this work for us. We feel pretty good about the timeline.”

The $38 million project is a public-private partnership, with the Sky also contributing funds for the facility through last summer’s capital raise, which added six women as minority owners, including Cubs co-owner Laura Ricketts.

The Sky will continue to train at Sachs through the 2025 season. Rawlinson said they considered moving players into the new training center while construction is ongoing but ultimately opted to preserve the grand reveal until the entire facility is operational.

Sky players never have had access to their own practice court or lockers. Players have become accustomed to sharing their gyms and locker rooms with locals and college students, mostly because they never knew anything else.

But women’s basketball is changing. By 2026, the Sky will be one of six WNBA teams operating their own training facilities. And that means this change — as momentous as it feels — is also necessary to maintain competitiveness.

During WNBA All-Star festivities in Phoenix last weekend, Rawlinson toured the Mercury’s new training facilities alongside Sky principal owner Michael Alter. Rawlinson described the tour as both exciting and validating — that the league is changing for the better and that the Sky are keeping up with progress.

“I feel like we are right there,” Rawlinson said. “This is a ‘rising tide raises all ships’ situation. Everyone is doing the right things, investing in their franchises in ways that make sense for them, and this is just going to be another beautiful facility to add to those that exist already and will be coming online in the league.”