What is Zipps Sports Grill (Hayden)?
Most of the Valley knows Zipps as a chain. The people of McCormick Ranch know it as the bar on the corner, because the Zipps Sports Grill at 8380 E Via de Ventura, on the northwest corner of Hayden Road and Via de Ventura, is the one the company itself calls “the original Zipps.” Its own page describes it as a neighborhood spot for McCormick Ranch and Gainey Ranch for the past 25 years.
Zipps dates its run to 1995, family-owned and operated throughout, and today lists 14 Valley locations. The same family had opened Goldie’s Sports Cafe on Via Linda two years earlier, and both brands repeat the same line: not a chain, not a franchise, not a national brand, owned by one family who live here. The site already covers the Camelback Road Zipps in Old Town and the Arcadia room in Phoenix; this is the one they grew from.
It is laid out like every Zipps because every Zipps is laid out like it: a family-friendly dining room, a separate 21-and-over bar lounge, a patio with misters, and a wall of HD screens with good sound. The kitchen is the family’s scratch menu, golden wings first, then burgers, the Monaco focaccia, a honey balsamic salad people top with wings, house-made honey mustard, and veggie burgers for the meatless. Happy hour is daily.
What sets this room apart is geography: Salt River Fields and Talking Stick are ten minutes east on Via de Ventura, so the original Zipps is also the spring-training Zipps. Our verdict: the most honest cheap seat for a game in central Scottsdale, and the clubhouse McCormick Ranch has used for a generation.
Game days, March and the lounge
Hours worth knowing. Monday through Wednesday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Thursday and Friday to midnight, Saturday 9 a.m. to midnight, Sunday 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.; the kitchen closes half an hour before the bar, and on Saturday it starts at 10. The 9 a.m. openings exist for early kickoffs, which in Arizona means the East Coast noon games.
Pick a room. The dining room is for families and it will be full of them on a Friday night. The 21-plus lounge is where the sound is up and the regulars are; it is where you sit for a Suns playoff game or a Cardinals Sunday. The misted patio handles the shoulder seasons and the overflow.
What to order. Wings, golden. The honey balsamic salad with golden wings on top is the order that regulars keep mentioning in reviews, and the Monaco focaccia is the sleeper. Get the house-made honey mustard on the side for the fries. The beer is cheap and cold rather than curated, which is the point, and the daily happy hour makes it cheaper.
The calendar. Spring training is the month this Zipps was built for: the Diamondbacks and Rockies play at Salt River Fields from late February through March, day games end around 4, and Via de Ventura brings the crowd straight to this corner. Our Cactus League guide has the schedule logic. The rest of the year it is NFL Sundays, March Madness, and the Talking Stick crowd that wants a cheap plate before a show.
Getting there. Shopping-center lot at Hayden and Via de Ventura. From the McCormick Ranch resorts it is a short rideshare or a greenbelt ride; from Old Town, ten minutes up Hayden. It takes no reservations for ordinary tables and books large parties through the website. For comparison shopping, see the happy hour guide.
The corner the chain came from
McCormick Ranch was Scottsdale’s first big master-planned community, laid out in the 1970s around lakes and the greenbelt, and by the 1990s its shopping corners were due for a bar that was not a resort lounge. The family that had opened Goldie’s in Scottsdale Ranch in 1993 built one here, and the name it carried, Zipps, became the one that traveled: Camelback Road, Kierland, Arcadia, Shea in Phoenix, Mill in Tempe, Ahwatukee, Gilbert, Ocotillo and the rest, 14 rooms by the 2020s. The company has never published founders’ names or an opening date for this room, and its own pages give two anchors, “since 1995” for the brand and “25 years” for the corner, so we call it the original and leave the exact year unwritten.
The formula was set here and never changed: a scratch kitchen, a golden sauce that the Valley now imitates, a separate adult lounge so families and fans can share a building, and prices that stayed at price level one while Scottsdale went to four. That consistency is why the chain survived the 2010s sports-bar boom that brought national lodges to the Airpark, and why the 2020s closure of the Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard Zipps on June 1, 2026, read as a real-estate story rather than a Zipps story; the Kierland room had just been rebuilt as the largest in the group in 2022, and Hayden and Camelback never wobbled.
Salt River Fields, opened in 2011 on the reservation across the 101, changed this room’s year more than anything the family did. Before that, March meant Scottsdale Stadium traffic on the Old Town Zipps; after it, the Hayden corner became the spring-training clubhouse for two teams’ fans, which is the kind of luck a 1990s bar on the right corner earns by staying open.
Honest assessment: it is a Zipps, and everything good and ordinary about that applies. The food is better than it needs to be, the room is louder than you want on a weeknight, and the lounge in March is one of the easiest good times in Scottsdale. On our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale it stands for the family-owned sports bar that outgrew its corner without leaving it.