Paige Bueckers hasn’t let up. Five years after she stood on the ESPYs stage as a 19-year-old college kid and called out the media for neglecting Black women athletes, the Dallas Wings guard says the fight is far from over.
Speaking before a game against the New York Liberty at Barclays Center on Tuesday, Bueckers made it clear this isn’t something she checked off a list and moved on from. She’s still on it.
“I feel like that’s a fight that we fight every single day, a fight for equal coverage, a fight for equality in general,” Bueckers told reporters, per Andscape.
She framed the work as bigger than basketball. Bigger than sports entirely. Bueckers described pushing for a world where people aren’t judged by their sex, skin color or who they love.
“It’s just something that we continue to fight for as a world every single day to just live in love, live in peace, live in a judgment-free environment,” she said.
That 2021 ESPYs moment is still the one people point to. A white player in a sport built by Black women, Bueckers used her microphone to redirect the spotlight. She said then that she wanted to lift up athletes who weren’t getting the recognition they deserved. It was raw and direct and she was barely old enough to buy a beer.
And a lot has changed since then. Bueckers won a national title at UConn in 2025. She went No. 1 overall in the WNBA draft that same year and took home Rookie of the Year. She’s already made All-WNBA second team and she’s headed to her second straight All-Star Game later this month in Chicago.
But the advocacy part? That didn’t change.
Now she’s one of the faces of the league. Sponsorships, magazine covers, the whole thing. And she’s aware that kind of platform can either be used or wasted.
“It’s just something that we continue to fight for,” Bueckers said. And by the sound of it, she plans to keep saying it until she doesn’t have to anymore.
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