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It’s hard to stand out on the frenetic streets of SoHo in New York City, but on a frigid afternoon in December, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team bus—navy blue, emblazoned with the school’s Siberian husky logo, and taking up four or five parking spaces—is unmissable. Officially, UConn is in town for the inaugural Shark Beauty Women’s Champions Classic in Brooklyn. The women have detoured into Manhattan to celebrate the first Nike Player Edition shoe released by a college athlete, the Paige Bueckers G.T. Hustle 3, designed by the Huskies star guard, a.k.a. Paige Buckets.
The baby blue and lavender shoes, with Bueckers’s name on the heel, represent a pinnacle of what’s possible at the dawn of the lucrative NIL era, which allows student-athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness. This change in the NCAA rules has dramatically tipped the power dynamics of college sports in favor of athletes over the last several years, not that you would necessarily know it from the intimate launch event. In a Nike loft space, UConn alum and WNBA veteran Sue Bird moderated a short Q&A with Bueckers for a small crowd that included Bueckers’s teammates; her mother, Amy; legendary UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma; Bueckers’s stylist Brittany Hampton; and a girls’ basketball team from the Upper West Side.
Wearing her team warm-ups and her signature hairstyle—parted in the middle and pulled back into a ponytail, with a pair of skinny, face-framing French braids on each side of the part—Bueckers looks like she is coming straight from practice, which she is. “This is surreal—I don’t even know if it’s truly set in yet,” Bueckers says while in conversation with Bird. “It means everything, and I’m extremely grateful.”
Having her own Nike shoe before even going pro might feel surreal to Bueckers, but, from the outside, it’s in no way surprising. First, there is the 23-year-old’s singular talent and dominance on the court. “She can really hurt you, and in a lot of ways,” Bird tells me. “Around the basket, great finisher; pull-up game, on point; obviously shoots the three very well; great passer.” What’s more impressive, Bird says, is how Bueckers handles the highs and lows of her position: “You don’t really see her get rattled.”
But timing is also at play here. Stepping right into the void left behind by Caitlin Clark as the best player in the NCAA women’s game, Bueckers perfectly represents the current moment in sports, in which viewership of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball championship (featuring Clark and Iowa, coming off a Final Four victory over Bueckers and UConn) was bigger than that of the men’s title game (18.9 million vs. 14.8 million), and in which NIL-powered brand deals can supercharge an athlete’s social media following (Bueckers has 2 million followers on Instagram).
In April, following Bueckers’s fifth season at UConn, she’s expected to be the number one pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft. But, with more leverage than any player in the history of basketball, she could stay put. Due to COVID rules, she’s eligible for a sixth year at UConn. And thanks to her endorsements—in 2021 she became the first college athlete to sign a deal with Gatorade—she doesn’t need a professional contract immediately.
Still, Bueckers (pronounced beh-kers) is talking about this year as if it’s her last one in college, like her best and final opportunity to lead the Huskies to a national championship. It’s a goal the team has thus far fallen short of throughout her college career, and Bueckers’s dogged pursuit of it requires tuning out the noise and remaining more humble than makes sense for someone with her talent and charisma.
At the Nike event, before the young girls snapped photos with Bueckers and Bird—leaving some of them completely speechless and others adorably giddy—one asks Bueckers, “When you feel nervous in a game, how do you move past that?”
“Nerves aren’t always a bad thing,” she responds. “It means you care. But a huge part of getting rid of the nerves is just staying where your feet are. The past can’t hurt you and the future can’t really help you. Just be where your feet are, and focus on the present.”
To understand how Bueckers became one of the most famous athletes in America, search “Paige Bueckers” on social media and watch your algorithm transform into a digital shrine to the basketball player’s magnetism. Her complete and total ease with herself emanates from the videos she’s made dancing with teammates KK Arnold and Ice Brady and from the fan edits of her on-court highlights and off-court antics.
It’s even more pronounced in person. Her teammate Azzi Fudd says she’s “never met anyone so confident,” and within moments of first meeting Bueckers at UConn’s Storrs, Connecticut, campus last October, I’m positive that I haven’t either. She walks with a relaxed, self-assured stride. Asked to describe herself as a basketball player, she tells me, matter-of-factly: “A competitor who can score at all three levels, defends, plays both sides of the court, very versatile, can really do anything that the game calls for and the team needs.” She looks everyone dead in the eye: coaches, teammates, reporters, fans, and the refs she is happy to argue with. When Bueckers appeared on LSU standout Flau’jae Johnson’s podcast, Johnson asked which one of them had “more rizz.” Without hesitation, Bueckers said, “I got top rizz in the world.”
No wonder people travel from all over to watch her play. No wonder Brooklyn’s Barclays Center feels like a home game when UConn plays Louisville the day after Bueckers’s Nike launch, with countless girls wearing her jersey, their hair in Paige braids.
“You can’t really be great unless you’re confident,” Bueckers says. Still, spending time with her, you’d be hard-pressed to clock an air of pretension. When she says she is humble, you believe her. “You don’t have to be exclusively one or the other,” she tells me. “In no way, shape, or form have I gotten here by myself—I’ve had so many people invest in me. That definitely keeps you humble as well.”
The number and kinds of people seeking to invest in Bueckers only grows. In addition to Nike and Gatorade, she has inked partnerships with Verizon, Bose, hair color brand Madison Reed, and trading card company Panini America, among others. (The college sports analyst On3, which estimates player values based on the compensation they receive, their media exposure, among other factors, lists Bueckers as the third most valuable woman in college sports, after LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne and LSU’s Johnson.) She signed a deal with Unrivaled—Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier’s 3-on-3 league—in 2024, which made Bueckers the first NCAA athlete to receive ownership stake in a pro sports league.
Let’s just say her cash flow exceeds that of your average college student. “It’s definitely crazy,” she says. “You become an adult before you’re actually an adult. I have a financial adviser, thank goodness, because taxes, that’s insane to me—I can’t believe I’m actually a part of that world now.” Has she bought a car? “I have not,” she says. She’s more than happy with her Jeep Grand Cherokee, which she got as part of a brand deal. “I do have a dream car, a Lamborghini Urus, but if I can get a car for free, why wouldn’t I do it?”
“I’m a saver,” she says. But when she needed an outfit for the 2024 WNBA draft, which she attended to support her former UConn teammates Nika Mühl and Aaliyah Edwards, Bueckers decided to treat herself. “I’d just played a whole healthy season,” she says of her 2023-24 effort, which concluded with the Huskies’ loss to Iowa in the Final Four. “Obviously, it did not end the way I wanted it to, but I was grateful to have [been] healthy, and I hadn’t spent money the whole entire season. I told my stylist, Brittany Hampton, ‘I want to go crazy—whatever it is, just put the card down.’ ”
They landed on a tailored cream suit by Louis Vuitton, which Hampton bought in New York and had shipped overnight to Storrs. The fitting took place over Zoom, after Bueckers finished practice. “If people could see the images of her trying it on on the UConn court, it would be nuts,” Hampton tells me. Bueckers admits that the suit’s price tag “hurt.” More than one friend told her, Bro, you don’t need to buy stuff, just ask for it. But it was worth it. “I knew I was steppin’ ,” she says.
For the 2024 ESPY Awards, Hampton, who first met Bueckers when she was hired to style one of the basketball player’s StockX shoots in 2021, dressed Bueckers in a lavender KidSuper suit, fresh off the runway. For the UConn star’s first New York Fashion Week last September, she was front row at Off-White in oversized, midriff-baring butterfly-embellished separates. “I know that I always have to bring her these kind of androgynous pieces that fit in with who she is,” Hampton says, “but best believe, she’s the one that’s like, ‘I want to put on a crop top and show a little body.’ ”
When I visit Bueckers at the Werth Family UConn Basketball Champions Center, Fashion Week is a distant memory and she has logged dozens of hours in the gym, prepping for a season that will be nearing its championship when this story hits newsstands. The 78,200-square-foot facility has an impressive glass façade, which opens to reveal gleaming floors, vaulted ceilings, and hallways collaged with Huskies excellence: Diana Taurasi on a fast break, Breanna Stewart making a layup, Auriemma posing with five UConn alumni he led to a gold medal at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Glistening in the sunlight that pours in is a staggering trophy display of UConn basketball’s utter dominance: 17 total National Championships—11 for the women, 6 for the men.
“It was my dream to come here,” Bueckers tells me. We’ve found an empty film room to chat in, and she is the picture of a college athlete in a navy UConn bomber jacket and matching sweatpants, plush Nike slides, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. That dream began in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where she was raised by her father, Bob, after her parents divorced and her mother moved to Montana to open a dental practice. “I played every single sport,” she says of her childhood. “I was always the first pick at recess; anything [with] a winner and a loser, I wanted to win.”
Bob, who played high school basketball and coached some of Paige’s youth teams, started to suspect his daughter’s athletic gifts were unusual when she was three. He threw his preschooler a football and she caught it, easily, and threw it back. He remembers thinking, Okay, I think we got something here. “You could tell at a very young age that her hand-eye coordination and her balance were off the charts,” he tells me when we talk on the phone.
By eighth grade, Bueckers was playing for her high school’s varsity team. She watched Huskies alum Maya Moore become one of the most dominant players ever in the WNBA on the Minnesota Lynx; meanwhile, in the NCAA, “UConn was winning everything,” she says. Between high school and AAU, Bueckers was playing basketball year-round and generating mild national buzz, but, she says, “When you looked at me then, you probably didn’t think, This girl looks like a hooper. I kind of knew how good I was, but nobody else really did.”
Nobody except the person whose opinion arguably mattered most: Coach Auriemma. From his office in the Werth Center, its walls covered with pictures from his many victory trips to the White House, Auriemma, the winning-est coach in Division I basketball history, lists his takeaways from the first time he saw Bueckers play, during her freshman year of high school: “Real thin, frail, really talented, gifted.” But that’s not what stood out. “Watching her, you could see that she and her teammates had a connection, and a lot of times the best player on the team doesn’t necessarily have a great connection with the rest of their players,” he says.
“She can get a bucket literally whenever she wants,” says Fudd, who entered UConn the year after Bueckers, “but she always wants to make sure everyone’s involved and we’re playing team basketball.” Fudd and Bueckers first met when they were both trying out for point guard on the USA Basketball U16 team. “I was like, Okay, I don’t have anything to worry about. This little white girl? I’ll make the team over her,” Fudd says. They both ended up making the team, but, Fudd says, “She was a lot better than I thought she was.”
They’ve been best friends ever since. “This is so on brand for Paige, but she made a little highlight video of herself from her high school games, passing to her teammates and giving them wide-open shots,” Fudd says. “She presented it to my family and was like, ‘You see all these open shots I’m giving to my teammates? That’s going to be Azzi [if] she comes to UConn and plays with me.’ ”
Though Bueckers had brief conversations with Maryland, Minnesota, Notre Dame, and UCLA, UConn was the only school she seriously considered. “Like I said, I always wanted to be a winner,” she tells me.
By that point, according to Bird, Bueckers was practically “anointed.” “I really don’t know that there’s been another player that had the following and attention that she had coming out of high school,” Bird says. Bueckers led her high school team through a perfect season and a state championship junior year. She was on track for another undefeated high school season when the pandemic hit. The season was cut short, and Bueckers received her high school diploma at a drive-through ceremony.
When she arrived in the village of Storrs, she says, “We didn’t even know if we were going to have a season yet.” The team trained and socialized in a COVID bubble. “Me and that freshman class, I feel like they’re going to be my bridesmaids,” she says. (Not that she’s planning a wedding anytime soon. “I’m more just focused on basketball,” she says of her relationship status. Plus, she adds of dating, “It’s a crazy world out here.”)
The Huskies did have a season, and for Bueckers it was an explosive one. She put up 32 points against St. John’s and 14 assists against Butler; won Big East Player of the Year, AP Player of the Year, and Naismith College Player of the Year. “Paige Bueckers came into this space with a ton of hype, and, man, she outdelivered it immediately,” says ESPN anchor Elle Duncan.
At the 2021 ESPY Awards, the then 19-year-old was named the Best College Athlete of the year in women’s sports. Bueckers was, officially and suddenly, the face of women’s college basketball, and she had mixed feelings about it. “I want to shed a light on Black women,” she said as she received her award. “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.”
The speech was met with a standing ovation, and the internet erupted with praise. “I was completely blown away,” Duncan says. Bob says he may or may not have cried. “I think it probably caught a lot of people by surprise, but it didn’t surprise me,” he says.
“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 (mom to her stepbrother, Randy, and half brother, Drew); 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.”
Bueckers accepted her ESPY Award two months after undergoing ankle surgery to repair cartilage damage, assuming the minor setback would be the only one of her college career. Then a meniscus tear and a tibial plateau fracture in December 2021 saw her benched for 19 games during her sophomore season, and a torn ACL ruled her out for her entire junior year.
Fans everywhere grieved Bueckers’s injuries. “She was the transformational generational talent that was promised,” Duncan says. “And to see so much of that momentum stalled multiple times because of things that were not within her control was devastating.” But, according to Auriemma, Bueckers herself kept pity at bay. “Some kids, when they’re missing the thing they love the most, when that’s taken away from them, they have a tendency to feel sorry for themselves,” the coach says. “She was completely the opposite of that. I know that probably inside it was killing her. But never once did she show that.”
For much of her life, Bueckers thought she was invincible. When the inevitable did happen, she says, “Quite literally, thank God for my faith, because if I didn’t have that, I feel like I wouldn’t have made it through.”
Bueckers wears her faith as proudly as her team colors, often referencing God in her interviews and social media captions. Though she grew up Catholic, she wasn’t very religious until high school, when she began attending a nondenominational church regularly with her then stepmother and would pray with an assistant coach and a trainer. How Bueckers became an athlete who listens to gospel before games, she says, is best summed up by a quote she once heard: “I didn’t build my relationship with God because of the way I was brought up, but more because I’ve seen the way He’s impacted my life.”
Her injuries were a wake-up call to change the way she treats her body. “I’m 23 and some of my teammates are 18, 17, so I’m the old body and the old head of the group,” she says. Last season, Bueckers ramped up her weight training and incorporated Pilates into her workouts. (Flexing her biceps became a signature on-court celebration.) Bueckers hates the sauna—“I can’t breathe in those things; I get claustrophobic”—but everyone tells her how good it is for recovery, so she acquiesces. “I’m not going to sit here and lie and say I eat super healthy,” she says, “but I eat a lot healthier than when I was a freshman.” Shirley Temples remain a weakness, but during the season, she makes the ultimate sacrifice: “I give up Chick-Fil-A.”
When we speak in the fall, Bueckers—who was named to the dean’s list four times at UConn—has a light postgraduate course load: a psychology class and a criminal justice course (her favorite show is Criminal Minds).
“I’m going to be honest: I’m tapped out of school,” she says. She has spent much of her life chronically overscheduled, and, finally, academics are off the list of priorities competing for her focus. She smiles and reclines further into her chair. “I graduated, got my degree, did well—so I asked my academic adviser, Ellen, to give me the easiest route possible.”
She has enough on her plate. “You see UConn win national championship after national championship, and they make it look super easy,” she says. “I’ve learned since I came here, it’s actually extremely hard.”
I tell Bueckers that I’ll be staying for practice and ask what I can expect to see.
“Us getting yelled at,” she tells me.
She’s not wrong. When Bueckers intentionally forgoes the final pass of a drill, Auriemma yells, “Good job, Einstein.” Later, when the team is running through various defense scenarios—against the all-male squad whose players have to try out to practice with the women—Coach tells them, bluntly, that they “may actually steal the ball” from the guys if they get low, as he’s been instructing them to do.
“He tells you what you don’t want to hear a lot of the time, and that’s sort of why you choose to come here,” Bueckers says. “I’ve always been a person who had excuses for things—a reason why I didn’t do this, a reason why I did do this. He’s really pushed me to break those habits and find no excuses.” Being a consummate team player is a strength she prides herself on, and this year, she says, Auriemma has also “challenged me to become a leader.”
“There’s a delusional side of Paige that I love,” Auriemma says. “She has to know better, but she comes across as, ‘I have never missed a shot; if I do miss, it’s because something happened. I have never fouled anybody in my life; the refs are always wrong.’ So there’s always this back-and-forth between me and her, because I know what kids want. They want to do it their way, they want it to be a little easier. The only problem is, that’s not what they need. They need the struggle of it. They need to see what it feels like to make sacrifices, to give up yourself, and have the failures that strengthen you and make you ready for those next steps in your life. That failure part I think is so important.”
Shortly after we speak, Bueckers will experience another failure. Following an electric 8-0 start, the Huskies are handed their first loss of the season when they fall 79-68 against rival Notre Dame, led by star guard Hannah Hidalgo. After her postgame interview, during which Bueckers says the Fighting Irish “wanted it more,” she is introduced to a girl named Piper who traveled over 2,000 miles from Washington State to watch Bueckers play. “I’m sorry we lost,” Bueckers says as the two embrace. In her Paige braids and Paige jersey, the young fan appears happy regardless.
The look of admiration on Piper’s face is familiar—as is Bueckers’s calm insistence on the task at hand. This fan, this loss. Not March Madness. Not the WNBA draft and her almost certainly bright future. “Obviously, winning is the main goal—that’s always at the forefront of my mind,” she tells me back in the film room. “But I think I’ve grown in my mentality. The National Championship is in April—you can’t win it unless you win every single day of practice and you win every single day in the weight room. Again, just staying in the present, staying in the moment, staying where my feet are.”
Perhaps she gets this mindset from her dad. When people ask Bob what Paige is going to do next year, he tells them: “Let’s everybody calm down. Take a deep breath. She’s at UConn. She loves it there. She’s trying to win a Natty, okay?”
Leah Faye Cooper is the digital style director of Vogue.com
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of GQ with the title “March Madness With Paige Bueckers”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Quil Lemons
Styled By Brandon Tan
Hair by Hayley Logan
Makeup by Raisa Flowers at E.D.M.A.
Manicure by Eri Handa
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Movement Direction by Ash Rucker
Production by Align Production
Shot on location at the University of Connecticut
Special thanks to the UConn Division of Athletics