How Sophie Cunningham Became a MAGA Fixation and the WNBA’s Lightning Rod

Her season ended early, thanks to an on-court collision—this one accidental—during another matchup against the Sun in August. Cunningham underwent surgery for a torn MCL.

This season, she has brand deals with the likes of Arby’s, European Wax Center, Skims, Spindrift, Mad Hippie, and Commerce Bank. She posed in this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Adidas issued a limited player-edition shoe for her. In early July, she popped up as a guest ring girl at a UFC event in Las Vegas. She has a one-year commentating contract with USA Sports this year, with executive producer Jeff Behnke telling USA Today they wanted her for her recognizability. “She says what’s on her mind and she is also really passionate about the game of basketball,” he said. On the court, she’s more visible than ever, too: All 44 of the Fever’s regular season games this year are nationally televised or streamed, the only team to get the full-court broadcast press, so to speak. (The league’s defending champions, the Las Vegas Aces, have 33 nationally broadcast games; 216 matchups were announced on the national broadcast schedule in April 2026.) If someone tunes in to a random WNBA game, odds are high that they’ll see Cunningham play.

Flagrant fouls and technical fouls come with fines owed to the league, but Cunningham is aware that her viral fame is worth more than the cost of those penalties. In an interview on the Sons & Daughters podcast in early July 2026, she said as much.

“I am not ignorant,” she said. “I know that if you use this platform, you can, once the ball stops bouncing, you’re setting yourself up for success, and the players need to start doing that because we don’t make enough money. Even now, after the CBA, we don’t make enough money to retire and not do anything once we’re done.”

Thanks to the transformative new collective bargaining agreement brokered between the players’ union (the WNBPA) and the WNBA, Cunningham got quite the boost in salary this year, in her eighth season in the league: Her new $665,000 contract is just shy of matching her combined salaries for the previous seven seasons, beginning with her $42,570 rookie contract with the Phoenix Mercury.

On the podcast, she drew a bright line between bodying Sheldon and her newfound notoriety.

“Sometimes my sassiness gets the best of me, and it worked in my favor last year and, yeah, companies—I took it and ran with it. I have a great agency that has really good people. And this year, I had no idea that this thing was going to take off because when I’m in it, I’m not thinking about that. I’m just being me, doing whatever dumb stuff that I do. So yeah, it is what it is, and I’m just going to continue to be me, and hopefully good things happen.”