'We got that vibe about us': Inside the StudBudz WNBA takeover
“I WENT OVER there to de-escalate the situation,” Natisha Hiedeman says. With her pink hair poking out of her blue hood, she’s explaining her role in an incident at the end of a Minnesota Lynx–Seattle Storm game. The details don’t matter much. But here goes: Hiedeman’s Lynx teammate Kayla McBride fouled Erica Wheeler on a…
“I WENT OVER there to de-escalate the situation,” Natisha Hiedeman says.
With her pink hair poking out of her blue hood, she’s explaining her role in an incident at the end of a Minnesota Lynx–Seattle Storm game. The details don’t matter much. But here goes: Hiedeman’s Lynx teammate Kayla McBride fouled Erica Wheeler on a drive to the basket. McBride scooped up the ball and tossed it in frustration toward Wheeler. Seattle’s Skylar Diggins rushed toward McBride. Hiedeman stepped in and had a few words for Diggins.
“I was like, ‘You know what? That whole little crush that I thought I had … it’s out the window. It’s gone.'”
Courtney Williams, sporting sunglasses and matching pink hair, busts out laughing in her perch next to Hiedeman. She grabs her teammate’s chair, shakes it and stomps her feet on the floor.
“You know what she told me?” Hiedeman continues. “‘Shut up. I know you still like me.'”
Williams. Just. Can’t. She gets up and staggers out of the frame as Hiedeman cackles at the camera that’s livestreaming the conversation.
This is StudBudz. They’re open. They’re honest. They’re Black. They’re gay. They’re masculine. They’re beloved. And they’re always recording.
At the start of the season, Williams and Hiedeman unleashed StudBudz accounts on Instagram and TikTok. From there they took their banter to Twitch. They streamed 72 straight hours during WNBA All-Star Weekend, which catapulted them into the mainstream and spawned merch like “Everyone watches StudBudz” T-shirts. Napheesa Collier even flaunted a giant StudBudz chain on the bench during Minnesota’s Aug. 21 game in Atlanta.
In a season deprived of a full suite of Caitlin Clark magic, in a season that saw the rise of the Lynx, in a league that has only recently embraced the variety of its players’ identities, the StudBudz have become the biggest thing in the WNBA.
THE PINK HAIR is everywhere.
At Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Renee Agosto and her 13-year-old daughter, Bailey, wear pink wigs and Liberty T-shirts at the New-York Minnesota game. “They’re authentically themselves,” Agosto says. “I think that’s such an amazing thing for young girls to look up to. And their laughs are contagious.”
At Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut, Darlene Cummings wears a StudBudz shirt and pink wig to a Lynx game. “I fell in love with the StudBudz,” Cummings says. “I just love how open they are.”
At the Minnesota State Fair, Andrew Heller rocks a Williams jersey as he walks around the grounds. There are still a few games to go in the regular season, but he already is making plans. “I’m going to have to get some washout pink hair dye for the playoffs,” Heller says.
The Lynx gave out pink wigs for Minnesota’s final regular-season home game. The Target Center stands looked like strawberry icing had been shot from dozens of T-shirt cannons.
Collier and McBride added pink highlights to their own hair.
Hiedeman’s mom, Ann Gevaert, has even been swept up by StudBudz fervor. “People want to take pictures with me,” Gevaert says. “They’re like, ‘That’s Tee’s mom!'” She has been gifted T-shirts with her daughter’s face on them and a “Stud Bud Mom” bracelet. She wears the bracelet to every game. “It’s just so fun,” Gevaert says.
“THAT DAY WAS just not the day for me,” Hiedeman says.
It’s late May, early in the season, and practice was rough. Williams and Hiedeman struggled. Turnovers on offense and porous on defense. Coach Cheryl Reeve let them have it, Williams says.
“It was one of them days, man,” Williams says. “It’s just like ‘Damn, Twin, do I suck at basketball?’ That’s what it be feelin’ like. ‘Damn, did I f— this up?'”
They both teared up during and after practice.
Wanting to rid herself of what she considers to be bad energy, Hiedeman calls Williams on FaceTime and runs the clippers through her blonde curls. First, she dyes her hair a light purple. Then she goes pink. Williams cheers her on.
Williams and Hiedeman trace their friendship to Connecticut, to 2019. Williams arrived in 2016, after she was drafted eighth by the Mercury and traded to the Sun later that season. Three seasons later, she welcomed Hiedeman, drafted 18th by the Lynx in 2019 and traded to the Sun on draft night. Williams invited the rookie out to celebrate her 25th birthday that May. They had a lot in common: Neither came to the WNBA from major college programs — Williams played at USF and Hiedeman played at Marquette. Neither grew up in basketball hotbeds — Williams is from Folkston, Georgia, population less than 5,000. Hiedeman’s hometown is Green Bay, Wisconsin. Both call themselves studs, a term used to describe Black, masculine and queer women.
“Man, she my baby, Bro,” Williams says. “She came in as a rookie just tryin’ to find her way. And we just immediately gravitated to each other.”
They reunited for a season in Connecticut in 2022, but their friendship popped the past two seasons in Minnesota because, well, they have time to hang out.
“We’re both single,” Williams says. “People laugh every time I say that, but the reality is being single is the major part of why we’re able to get so close. ‘Cause reality is, we know gay relationships. When you’re in a gay relationship, you’re with ’em every day. You in each other’s skin every day.”
If Williams was in a relationship, she wouldn’t get out of bed to go out with Hiedeman at 11:30 at night. They wouldn’t talk as much (they’ve been known to text and chat all day). “I’m on the phone with Tee more than anybody,” Williams says.
They figured they couldn’t be the only people who would be entertained by their banter. So, they turned a camera on themselves.
Before launching their livestream, Williams and Hiedeman told their teammates their plans. To show their support, many Lynx players paraded through their hotel room and hopped on the first stream. There was a (bad?) freestyle to introduce McBride, and a dissection of whether Alanna Smith‘s outfit sent gay or straight signals (“It’s giving stem,” Williams said, a mashup of stud and femme). There was lively discussion about who on the team Collier would hypothetically let her daughter date. (“Not these two,” Collier joked, motioning to Williams and Hiedeman before specifically explaining her stance to Williams. “You’d send her back to the ’50s. She’d have to cook and clean and take your dogs out.”)
So, after that rough practice and after Hiedeman dyes her hair, Williams tells viewers on the stream that she will dye her hair to match if they get to 1,000 subscribers. The StudBudz are on the road in Seattle when the subscriber count crosses the threshold. They have hair dye sent to their room and dye Williams’ hair on stream.
“I wanted to be a woman of my word,” Williams says. “So, we had to order the stuff to the hotel room and dye my hair, just me and Tee.”
“WE FINE AS S—,” Williams tells me one day in August. “We put it on. We got that vibe about us. We ain’t never hurtin’ for no women.”
It’s not just the pink hair. Or the sunglasses. Or the baseball hats. Or the hoodies. Or the chains. It’s aura.
Williams and Hiedeman routinely talk about “baddies” on the stream. They talk about what they look for in women. (Spoiler: Also, baddies.) They streamed a double date. For now, they remain single, much to the dismay of some fans.
At Barclays Center, Charlotte McKinley clutched her homemade sign, waiting to get a glimpse of pink hair from her seat near the player tunnel. “Here 4 the Studbudz,” her sign read in black marker on one side of the poster board. She flipped it over to the declaration on the other side. “Down bad 4 Natisha Hiedeman.”
McKinley, 28, is a professional dancer in New York. She said she started getting into the WNBA about six months ago but got serious about it within the past three months, in part, because of the StudBudz.
When Hiedeman started walking toward the tunnel and McKinley’s seat, McKinley waved her sign and shouted to Hiedeman. “I have a gift for you,” she said when Hiedeman got close enough.
McKinley reached into the deep V of her denim vest and pulled a folded piece of paper from her bra. Written inside was her phone number.
Hiedeman put the piece of paper in her pocket, took a selfie with McKinley, and ran up the tunnel toward the locker room. When she saw Collier, Hiedeman handed her the paper and said someone wanted Hiedeman to give it to her.
Collier opened it up and laughed. “No, they didn’t,” she said.
Back in Minnesota a few days later, Hiedeman tells me she hasn’t texted McKinley. “I’m just in my single era right now,” she says.
She smirks. “It’s not the first time.”
THE FIRST PRIDE initiative in the WNBA didn’t happen until 2014. The first of its kind in American professional sports, the initiative highlighted the pressing need to serve LGBTQIA+ fans. The relationship between the WNBA and queerness among its fan base and players had been historically fraught. Early marketing campaigns highlighted femininity, whether it was authentic or not for the players being showcased, something that Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi have spoken about in recent years. In 2002, Lesbians for Liberty staged a kiss-in at a New York Liberty game to protest what they saw as lesbian erasure.
There were Pride nights before 2014 and there were openly gay players before then too, the first of whom was Sue Wicks in 2002. Three-time MVP Sheryl Swoopes shared she was in a relationship with a woman in 2005 (though she has since identified differently), Seimone Augustus came out in 2012, Brittney Griner was openly gay even before she was picked No. 1 in the 2013 draft. But in the past 10 years superstars like Bird, Taurasi, Elena Delle Donne, Candace Parker, Chelsea Gray and many others have turned a spotlight on queer players in the league.
Still, the WNBA fanbase has mostly been served conventionally feminine players, even among those who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Another word for marketability is desirability. The StudBudz’s queer ethos flips assumptions about attractiveness to fans and sponsors alike. Masculine women, they say, are sexy, too.
Williams has pointed out the missed opportunities before. When five WNBA players were highlighted in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue for the first time in 2022, the presentation of those five players was markedly feminine. “I love Sports Illustrated’s attempt to be more inclusive and amplify women in the W,” Williams wrote on X. “At the same time though it would of been raw to see a sleek lil sports bra & some shorts swaggin’. There’s more than one way to look sexy, and I hope in the future we can tap into that.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by coaches and other players, too.
“When I was first in [the WNBA], there was so much attention on the league being successful,” Reeve says. “That translated to societally pretty players doing things that society at large viewed as marketable. So, you look at the queer players at that time having to be something they weren’t because they were told, ‘Well if you don’t, then this all may go away.’ To see that we’ve evolved into a space where you can show up to work, be who you are and be celebrated for it, I think it’s a special time.”
Liberty guard Natasha Cloud cosigns.
When asked about the appeal of masculine women, she smirks and flexes her arms. “My s— gonna sell too,” she says.
“There’s just as many women screaming about us. The investment should be there. I just feel like the W is dumb for not doin’ it, ’cause why don’t you want to be paid?”
The StudBudz have attracted some brands on their own. They recently dyed their hair “period red,” for a partnership with Kotex and managed to have fun with a topic that has traditionally been taboo. At one point, Williams is dead over Hiedeman’s cramp-combatting technique: Laying down in the shower. “Who does that? I ain’t never heard of that,” she says. (Don’t worry. The red was, shall we say, cyclical. They’re back to pink now.)
Williams sees their content as filling a need for some, and she understands that StudBudz, despite the claim on their T-shirts, might not be for everyone.
“I think everybody get to kinda see how we vibe, how we talk to women. Because, one, where you ever really see that? You see all these datin’ ‘Love Island’ and all these different things. But it’s like you rarely see, like you said, gay interactions. Maybe that might not be what you wanna see, and that’s cool. You don’t gotta watch that stream. Watch another one.”
“YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert says to Williams and Hiedeman during WNBA All-Star weekend in July. The StudBudz stream the entire weekend. Literally. And it’s impossible to look away.
There’s a moment between Diggins and Hiedeman when Diggins comes over to say hi on the orange carpet. “What’s a Stud Bud?” she jokes as she approaches them. Diggins and Hiedeman hug, while Williams gives a knowing side-eye because of, well, the crush heard round the internet.
The StudBudz dance with Reeve, draping their arms over their coach’s shoulders, bopping along with her to the music. Reeve throws her head back and laughs. Coach and players, from different generations, and all three members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
They hang out with Clark.
“Oh, we’re live!” Clark yells as she daps up Williams on the stream.
“We’ve got Caitlin Clark in the building!” Williams yells at the camera. Clark tells Williams and Hiedeman that she has been watching the stream at home.
The moment starts a meme for the StudBudz who begin to joke that they will “call Caitlin Clark” whenever they need help with anything, like getting into an Indy club.
Williams dances with Angel Reese, and I mean dances.
And with “Knuck If You Buck” thumping in the background, the StudBudz dance with the WNBA commissioner.
“They pulled the curtain back and showed that we’re all friends off the court,” Collier says. “We’re competitors on the court, so that’s why it feels so feisty. But off the court, we’re all cool.”
All-Star Weekend launches the StudBudz into a different stratosphere. According to Google Trends, “StudBudz WNBA” search interest in the U.S. increased over 5,000% in July compared to June. During All-Star week, the query “StudBudz merch” increased over 5,000% in U.S. search interest compared to the previous week.
None of it would have happened without basketball success as the foundation.
“WE WANT TO bring this organization back to where it’s always been,” Williams says.
The Minnesota Lynx are among the most successful franchises in WNBA history. They won four championships in seven years: 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. Those teams were anchored by a core of Hall of Famers: Lindsay Whalen (2022), Seimone Augustus (2024), Maya Moore (2025) and Sylvia Fowles (2025). Whalen and Rebekkah Brunson, who was also a member of those championship teams, are both on the Lynx staff this season.
The Lynx made it back to the WNBA Finals last year for the first time since winning the 2017 title, but they fell in five games to the New York Liberty.
Williams is the starting point guard for the top-seeded Lynx, who are up 1-0 in their semifinal series against the Phoenix Mercury. Hiedeman is her backup, but they often share the court. Game 2 is Tuesday (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN) in Minneapolis.
For the StudBudz, the Lynx’s championship heritage is important, and adding to it is their primary focus.
Since the calendar flipped to September, Hiedeman is averaging 14.8 points per game, including 18 in the Lynx’s Game 1 win over Golden State in the first round. Primarily known for knocking down 3-point shots early in her career, Heideman is shooting 57.7% from inside the arc this season.
“Cheryl and them, they created that culture and carried that through years,” Hiedeman says. “She obviously wants the best players to play for her. But she’s also looking for the best people. When you do that, the culture is obviously gonna be amazing.”
Williams averages 6.2 assists, second most in the league. Many consider her “middy” to be the best in the game, but this season she’s shooting 38.9% from beyond the arc at a career-high volume. She had 23 points, 8 rebounds, 7 assists and 5 steals in Minnesota’s 82-69 Game 1 win over the Mercury.
“I think you see in my game now, how I just elevated my game since last year,” Williams says. “Even havin’ Whalen come in, and havin’ that mixture of her and Cheryl be in my ear, it’s just done elevated my game so much for sure.”
They’re both quick, pesky defenders and average a combined two steals per game.
“On-court success is what we’re all here for,” Reeve says.
“Courtney has established herself as one of the best point guards in this league. Without that, our franchise isn’t where we are. We lost a key bench player from last year’s team, and Tee’s evolution has helped fill that void. The confidence and the things that she’s giving us have been really vital to our success.”
That’s not to say that the StudBudz haven’t presented some challenges for Reeve.
“I feel like my boundaries have been stretched,” Reeve says. “Sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn’t. I know I’ve been difficult for them at times, really trying to challenge them to come to my side a little bit. There’s a little bit of give and take in there because I think there’s certain things it takes to win a championship. Learning how to coach those two and them teaching me a little along the way has been fun.”
Their commitment to Minnesota’s championship chase has never been in doubt.
“It’s not something we’ve had to talk about or worry about,” Collier says. “When we’re on the court together, we’re focused on winning. We’re not focused on anything else.”
This season, the Lynx had the best record in the league, won the most games in franchise history and secured home-court advantage through the playoffs. They swept the Valkyries in the first round.
If Minnesota wins the WNBA championship, prepare for a StudBudz party.
The camera will be on.
