SerpApi.Org
Sophie Cunningham had already done her job on the basketball court. The rest of the league, though, was still trying to figure out what to do with her.
The Indiana Fever guard has spent the past year turning one late-game headlock into a full-blown personality. Fans either can’t get enough of her or can’t stand her, and somehow both camps keep watching anyway.
It all traces back to a single sequence against the Connecticut Sun in 2025. The Fever were up 17 with 46 seconds left, the kind of lead where nothing is supposed to happen. Sophie Cunningham had other plans.
The Takedown That Changed Everything For Sophie Cunningham
Jacy Sheldon had just poked Caitlin Clark in the eye earlier in that same game. Cunningham remembered. When Sheldon grabbed a loose ball on a fast break late in the fourth, Cunningham chased her down, wrapped her up in a headlock, and put her on the floor.
It was not a basketball play so much as a statement. The referees ejected her on the spot, a scrum broke out, and the internet did the rest.
“If my teammates need me to stick up for them, I will do that,” Sophie Cunningham has said of the moment.
That single sentence has basically become her mission statement. She has said it in different ways a dozen times since, and she has never once walked it back.
Here is where things get a little wild. Google searches for her name jumped 800 percent in the four days after that game. Her TikTok following went from around 300,000 to 1.4 million in a week. It now sits above 3 million, which is more than Clark’s following and more than four-time MVP A’ja Wilson’s.
Within two weeks, she had signed with Ring, the home security company, which is a detail that writes its own jokes. More deals followed. More travel followed too, so much of it that one of her own reps compared her schedule to peak Shaquille O’Neal.
None of this happened because she suddenly became a star scorer. She is shooting a career-best 43.7 percent from three this season, which is good, but nobody is building billboards around a bench player’s shooting splits. They are building them around what she represents.
Ask her if she is bothered by being called dirty, or an enforcer, or worse, and you get the same answer every time.
“People love me or they really frickin’ hate me,”she has said. “I just don’t care.”
Her coach Stephanie White has credited that attitude with toughening up the entire Fever roster over the last two seasons. Teammate Kelsey Mitchell has said she loves that Sophie Cunningham does not mind “getting dirty” when a game calls for it. Nobody in that locker room seems to want the version of her that plays it safe.
The attention has not come free. Sophie Cunningham has dealt with unwanted contact from strangers that reached the point of law enforcement getting involved, and she has had to rethink basic things like where she lives. Fame like this rarely arrives without a cost attached.
Sophie Cunningham signed a new one-year deal to stay in Indiana after this year’s labor standoff finally got resolved in March, so the Fever are not losing their most unpredictable piece anytime soon.
Whether the rest of the WNBA figures out how to guard her, or how to talk about her, is a separate question. Based on the last twelve months, they probably will not have much say in it either way.
