The WNBA is in its fun era. Thank the Studbudz

“We were running our mouths on chat, and they don't miss a beat,” Hiedeman, who goes by “T,” remembers. “So if you say something, it's like—” and here Williams interjects, mimicking their beloved and committed Twitch fans, who apparently have steel-trap memories for anything Budz-related: “Oh, remember y'all said that? Remember y'all said that?"

“So then it was like, ‘Oh yeah, we did say that,’” Hiedeman says. “‘We got to make it happen.’”

They kept their word. That weekend, they got WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert on stream, dancing to “Knuck If You Buck.” Caitlin Clark’s aunts approached them in the club and asked for a photo. They tossed back so much Crown Royal that Hiedeman had to order an IV bag to their hotel one morning. And when the dust had settled on their now-infamous, chaotic, and outrageously fun inaugural 72-hour All-Star Weekend stream, they sensed the ground beneath them had unalterably shifted. Their arrival had aligned with a second consecutive breakthrough season for the WNBA, in which TV viewership and attendance records were set and then re-set, and it was clear to anyone watching that the Studbudz had tapped into an audience that was hungry for more. More content, sure—but also more access and less polish, an unfiltered window into WNBA stars’ multifaceted lives that wasn’t being offered anywhere else. That weekend alone, the Studbudz peaked at about 25,000 concurrent viewers, and one of their streams eventually racked up 500,000 views. Hiedeman estimates she added more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, and the two were inundated with brand inquiries and requests for collaboration.

“We in a hotel room getting deals on the spot!” Williams recalls. “We like, ‘Bro, what is going on, bro?’” At one point, Hiedeman looked over at Williams in the bed across from her in their shared hotel room and thought to herself, This might be the best weekend of my life.

What had started out as something of a lark—a low-lift sidequest for longtime teammates and fun-loving partners-in-studdom—suddenly looked like it had the potential to be something more. The Studbudz showed a side of the league that was Blacker, gayer, and looser than anything we’d seen before. And they did it all without asking first.

When I talk to the Studbudz over video conference in early July, a year has passed since that fateful weekend, and things look a little different. For one, Williams and Hiedeman no longer have their trademark matching pink hairstyles. They are also no longer teammates. Hiedeman is calling in from a road trip with the Seattle Storm, whom she signed with in April, while Williams is back in Minneapolis, preparing for a home game against the Lynx’s rival New York Liberty the following day. Separating after the most transformative season of their pro careers has been hard on the Budz, but they still FaceTime almost every day—if they don’t, “I kind of be feeling funny at the end of the night,” Hiedeman says—and they are still committed to their shared venture. The 2026 All-Star Weekend in Chicago is on the horizon, and Williams and Hiedeman are preparing for another all-in stream, this time in partnership with AT&T. There’s some pressure this time around, sure. How can they recreate the magic of that first run? How can they top what they did last summer?

“Shit,” Williams says. “You just got to do it all over.”

Williams and Hiedeman first crossed paths in 2019, during a practice for the Connecticut Sun. Curt Miller, their head coach in Uncasville and the first out gay male coach in the league, sensed something special in the two scrappy guards. “Natisha's ability behind ball screens and [her] ability to spray the ball, I thought she could really score,” Miller says. “And then of course Courtney is one of the best mid-range players that we've seen.”

They also shared an undeniable joyfulness for both life and the game. “I was really drawn to their personalities and their energy to play every day,” says Miller, who is now the general manager of the Dallas Wings. “What's so underrated in our league is [it’s] really a difficult cadence with the amount of games we play. It seems so simple, but having players that show up every day [and] love the game made my job so much easier.”

Williams, who had been with the Sun since 2016, invited her rookie teammate to her twenty-fifth birthday party at Foxwoods, a casino 10 miles down the road from their homebase at Mohegan Sun. “She was the only one that I invited on the team because I felt like she was on the same frequency I was on,” Williams says. “She pulled up and we turned up.” They danced, drank, and smoked hookah, and formed a quick and easy bond.

It helped that they had a lot of time to get to know each other. Up until the league’s groundbreaking 2020 contract, non-vet WNBA players had to share hotel rooms on the road, and Hiedeman and Williams were roommates during their first season together. The slow pace of life in Uncasville was well-suited to forging close friendships. “It’s a unique market with not a lot of things to do for these young, mainly African American professional athletes,” Miller says. “In the Connecticut market more than any other, it was unique how much time they spent together.”

That first season as teammates ended in heartbreak, with the Sun losing to the Washington Mystics in Game 5 of the Finals. They were reunited for another Finals run in 2022, when Williams returned to Connecticut after brief stints in Atlanta and Chicago, but the Sun once again fell short, losing to Las Vegas 3-1. But it was in Minnesota, where the two were reunited again in 2024, that their friendship truly blossomed.

“We really locked in when we both was going through relationship problems,” Williams remembers. “We just had so much free time because it wasn't all wrapped up in a relationship. We started talking about real stuff. It's like, ‘Dang, I can really call this joker and talk to her about more than just surface level stuff.’ Once you hit that level, then it's like, All right, you my dog.”

“I have friends, but Courtney know everything about me,” Hiedeman says. “You have friends that you are cool with, can talk to and whatever, but [Courtney knows] my deepest, darkest secrets, everything.”

“She done been at where I'm from,” Williams says. “She done been around my mom a lot. She done been around my family. We family.”

In Minnesota, head coach Cheryl Reeve asked Williams to play the point, a position she’d barely played in the league before. But after eight seasons in the W, the newly-minted veteran was ready for the change.

“Courtney had really matured in her game, but really had grown in being a true professional,” Miller says. “She had started to eat better. She had started to prepare more because she knew that ultimately it was more than just relying on her incredible athleticism. And so she was truly prepared for [Reeve] moving her into that point guard spot. She embraced it and just really, really thrived.”

Hiedeman, for her part, was reliable coming off the bench for a loaded Minnesota roster, and the Lynx made it all the way to the finals, where they eventually lost 3-2 to New York.

It wasn’t until early in the following season when, after chatting about it in the locker room, they decided to give streaming a try. “We just had so much time on our hands and we was already spending so much time together,” Hiedeman says. “There was no plan at all, honestly.”

They turned the camera on, watched basketball games while they chatted, cracked jokes, and sometimes had teammates on as guests. Early on, there were no more than 40 people watching at a time. “We ain't have many,” Williams says. “But we was popping it on there. We ain't care.” (The Studbudz are nothing if not loyal, and many of those day-one fans now serve as mods for their Twitch channel.) Soon after, Williams promised to dye her hair pink to match Hiedeman’s if the stream reached 1,000 followers, which happened in only three days. “Them folk didn't waste no time!” Hiedeman says. “They just started sending in the subs, to the point we literally had to order the dye to the hotel room.”

“When we got [to 1,000], it was like, Oh, wow,” Williams says. “We moving a little bit.”

By All-Star Weekend, they’d built a strong following and easy rapport. Williams and Hiedeman have a natural chemistry with one another, and a rare comfort in their respective roles. In Indy last summer, where Williams was playing in her second All-Star game, Hiedeman was her willing hypewoman, carrying battery packs to make sure they’d always stay charged and propping up her teammate at every opportunity. “The parties were unmatched, but I was really just happy to be there to watch Courtney be an All Star, for real,” Hiedeman says. “That was the best part for me.”

As their conjoined brand has grown, they’ve had to learn how to work together off the court, too. The dynamic between best friends naturally changes when they become business partners, and they’ve been mindful about navigating that transition together.

“When you really care about somebody, man, you got to be willing to tell them when they ain't doing what they supposed to do,” Williams says. “Because how can I have you a part of my camp or a part of my team and you ain't moving how I know we move? And vice versa. I got to be able to take that if you give it to me. It done been times we done beefed out about it. We always attack the problem, though. It might be some tension getting there, but by the end of it all, we understand how to move better moving forward.”

“The trust and the friendship that we have off the court really helped on the court,” Hiedeman adds. “When Courtney would get on me or we would get on each other, it was never personal. It was always because we always wanted to bring out the best in each other.”

It helps that they have a natural yin-and-yang dynamic. Williams, Hiedeman says, “is the assertive one, the one who gets things done, one who talks about the things that need to be talked about. And then there's me.”

“A free spirit,” Williams says.

“I be free spirited,” Hiedeman agrees.

“Real vibey,” Williams adds, smiling appreciatively at her friend on the screen. “She's just going to go with the flow and just keep every day peaceful.”

(Put differently, for the gays in the back: Williams is a Taurus and Hiedeman an Aquarius.)

Together, their energy is loving and comfortable. They call each other “twin,” and delight in evoking laughter and sentimentality from each other in equal measure. Their content is charged with giddy energy: Can you believe we get to do this shit? Perhaps that’s because they really and truly did it all on their own—revealing a side of All-Star Weekend, and the league, that even longtime fans had never seen.

The streams have disrupted the calcifying sameness of most WNBA coverage. For much of its history, the league disproportionately promoted its straight (or at least straight-coded), femme-presenting stars to the public, and largely ignored its gay fan base and players. When Tamika Whitmore was playing for New York in the early aughts, she remembers, “the powers that be did not like it [at all].” In 2002, lesbian Liberty fans went so far as to stage a “kiss-in” to bring attention to the franchise’s avoidance of its queer fan base. “I remember sitting in the timeout just looking around like, Is this really happening?” Whitmore says. She was out to her friends and family then, but felt like the league had an informal “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the matter: “You knew people were gay, but it was something that just wasn't talked about. If you came out as gay, the league just kind of had a hands-off approach with you. Honestly, I thought if the league didn't start accepting their gay fan base that it would struggle to exist.”

That climate had shifted somewhat by 2016, when Williams—who didn’t come out until she was in college—was drafted eighth overall. But on draft night, she wore a form-fitting black dress and a full face of makeup. “It was always this idea that you had to be this feminine woman,” Williams says. She didn’t publicly embrace her masc side until she was playing in Australia one offseason and cut her long hair to deal with the heat. “Once I cut my hair off, I was a goner,” she says, laughing. “I was a full-blown stud.”

Now, thanks to the Studbudz and the league’s diverse array of proudly out players, the league is finally shifting course. Whitmore hopes it underscores for the WNBA front offices that “your home base market has always been associated with the gay community. From day one, they've been the number one supporters of the WNBA. It just hasn't always been the stereotypical family atmosphere.”

The success of the stream, Miller says, shows that “the players are more than making a basket or a defensive stance. One of the things is that you learn right away these guys are more than just basketball players. They're truly unique celebrities. And I think the fans will just continue to gravitate as they learn more and more about these players off the floor.”

The grassroot success of the Studbudz has also arguably helped usher in more opportunities for their fellow players. Later this month, ESPN will premiere Life in the W, a new docuseries which promises to show “the intensity of the WNBA season from multiple perspectives,” and player-hosted podcasts are proliferating.

That first 72-hour stream, Williams says, “showed that everybody hungry to see what the W girls doing. It's just not enough footage, especially when it comes to the off-the-court lifestyle. You never get to see how folks really turn up or have fun outside of basketball. Any glimpse into people's real life, that's what they want to see. Folks nosy, man. Folks wanna see what's going on.”

It’s not a coincidence that the players are leading the way in shifting the public’s perception of the league, or that it’s happening alongside their growing capital. The 2020 CBA raised player compensation by 53 percent; the newest contract, signed in March, enabled players like Williams and Hiedeman to have million-dollar contracts for the first time in their careers, along with other historic gains. Plus, thanks to new NCAA rules permitting college athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness, many rookies arrive in the league with sizable fortunes to their names already. That kind of financial security—and acknowledgment of their value—naturally begets freedom and empowerment among the league’s workforce.

The Studbudz wasted no time in enjoying their newfound liquidity. They had matching Jeeps for a couple months—“not regular-degular Jeeps,” Hiedeman clarifies: “They're like tanks”—before T decided she needed “a big old truck with a big old engine in it” and traded hers in for a Hellcat. She also splurged on a chain with her initials on it, but says she’s otherwise trying to invest wisely for her future.

Williams, meanwhile, says she’s living in the moment. “I'm outside!” she says. “I'm having a ball! Especially because I'm simple. I don't need much. I just like to turn up with my family and my friends. Some people like houses, some people like cars, some people like clothes. Me? I like standing on couches and throwing money!”

I suggest that someone should study how the influx of cash with the new CBA has bolstered the strip club economy in WNBA-franchise cities, but Williams shakes her head. “They don't really be outside like that,” Williams says. “It's only the select few that really give it up like that.”

“Yeah, and you're looking at the top two right here,” Hiedeman adds, sending Williams into peals of laughter.

Their rise has also, unsurprisingly, had an effect on their dating lives. Studbudz fans are legion; at games last year, I frequently spotted pink hair in the stands, as well as a hopeful"Here 4 the Studbudz" homemade sign at a Liberty-Lynx game. Hiedeman has signed at least one boob. “It’s been a lot of motion,” Williams says.

“Don't ask Courtney!” Hiedeman interjects, laughing. “[These girls] be coming at Courtney bold. They want her bad.”

Williams smiles. She’s single and having a good time. “It ain't going to be like this forever,” she says. “Might as well enjoy it while I'm in it.”

“Am I single?” Hiedeman says ponderingly. “I'm off the market.”

“So you're not single!” Williams says, laughing. “If you're off the market, that means you're not single. You're in a relationship.”

“Take it how you want to take it, world,” Hiedeman says.

“She's in a relationship and I'm single,” Williams offers. “For all the girlies that want to know.”

Their banter reminds me of something Whitmore observed when we talked about the rise of the Studbudz. “They are being genuinely who they are,” she said. “What you see is what you get with them. When it comes to basketball, both of them take it super serious and you can see it in the way they play and the way they train. But you can't live life serious all the time. There has to be some type of comic relief. They are genuine about their job; they're genuine about their sense of humor; they're genuine about how they live life, period.”

So much in this era of professional women's sports is, by necessity, rooted in the fight for equality, for better treatment, better pay, better opportunities. WNBA players routinely receive death threats and racist and homophobic attacks, and in addition to their jobs as athletes they're expected to regularly stand up and speak out for so much more. The Studbudz are down for that cause, but they’re also a refreshing reminder that exceptional women athletes can be a lot of fun, too. Especially when they’re allowed to be themselves.

“It's the best when somebody just comes up to you like, ‘Oh, you have no idea what you did for my relationship with me and my daughter,’” Hiedeman says. “It's crazy, because you don't understand it when we just stream. We just on there talking. You're not thinking about how impactful [it is] and what you actually doing for people.”

Hiedeman has flourished in Seattle, where she’s averaging career highs in her first season as a starter. “I've been really just embracing my time out here and enjoying it, enjoying my teammates,” Hiedeman says. “I just miss my friend a little bit more now. That's all it is.”

Williams, who will play in her third All-Star game in Chicago this weekend, says the plan is to keep the Studbudz alive, even if they never end up on the same team again. “I want our All-Star Weekend to be like Streaming University,” she says. "We're not able to stream as much as we was when we was on the same team, [but] it's something that people look forward to every year. No matter what it is we doing in the between time, we know that we can always turn All Star Weekend up and folks can get that inside look. So hopefully [it’ll get] bigger and bigger.”

“And to continue having fun,” Hiedeman says. “You just got to have fun with life.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Photographs by Derrick Chui

Skin by Diamond Crowder

Special thanks to Caspers and Runyons NOOK