University of Connecticut women’s basketball star Paige Bueckers recently sat for down a massive cover story with GQ Sports as she leads the (currently) fifth-ranked Huskies into the NCAA Tournament for the final time. Bueckers is projected to be selected #1 overall in the 2025 WNBA Draft.
Similar to WNBA phenom Caitlin Clark, Bueckers began her college career in 2020-21 and got off to a similarly flying start, averaging 20 points, 5.8 assists and 4.9 rebounds per game during her rookie season. Her sophomore year, however, Bueckers played in just 17 games due to injury (starting 13), and then missed the entirety of the 2022-23 season after tearing her ACL.
Paige Bueckers rebounded in 2023-24, has stayed healthy all of this year, and is the favorite to be taken #1 in next season’s draft, giving the WNBA a pair of back-to-back #1 overall picks with star power the likes of which the league has maybe never seen.
In the GQ cover story, Bueckers was asked about her speech at the 2021 ESPY Awards when she won Best College Athlete of the year. During the speech, Bueckers said:
“I want to shed a light on Black women. They don’t get the media coverage that they deserve. They’ve given so much to the sport, the community, and society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.”
“’I grew up with a lot of influential Black women in my life,’ Bueckers tells me: her longtime AAU coach Tara Starks; her former stepmother; countless teammates she’s played with over the years. ‘I feel like a lot of people shy away from having those conversations,’ she says of her speech, ‘[but] to use my platform to do that, I thought was very important,'” she told GQ this month, four years later.
If Bueckers does got #1 overall in this spring’s WNBA draft, she’ll land in Dallas as a member of the Dallas Wings, who were the Detroit Shock from 1998 to 2009, winning three WNBA titles during that time. The franchise has not appeared in the WNBA Finals since 2008.
The post UConn Star Paige Bueckers Says She Wants To Use Her Platform To Have Conversations About Race appeared first on BroBible.
UConn Star Paige Bueckers Says She Wants To Use Her Platform To Have Conversations About Race
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