WSLAM Presents: The WNBA Creators, Journalists and Creatives Making Waves and Growing the Game
In an ever-changing media landscape, women’s sports content is now, more than ever, all over our feeds, timelines and news coverage. For those of us who have always tuned in, this ain’t anything new—from media and journalists to sports personalities, there are many, many people who have worked endlessly over the years to cover women’s hoops. With all the new fans and viewers turning in, along with the rise of social media, there’s also been a rise of content creators covering the W in their own, unique ways, too
As we get ready to celebrate the start of the 2024 WNBA season, WSLAM is hyped to spotlight some of the many talented creatives in the industry who are making waves, growing the game and helping push women’s basketball coverage forward, all on their own terms. We asked them a range of questions, from how they got into social to their approach to building their personal brands, what they’re most excited for this season and, of course, their average screen time.
Don’t get it twisted though, this isn’t an exclusive list or “club,” but rather a celebration. And if you’re passionate about women’s hoops, too, we invite you tune in, tap in, and share how much you love the game, one post at a time.
How do you balance being a journalist with your social presence: I think it’s a combination of the two: between being authentic and real and then naturally building a following. I feel like that for me is what works best. There are some other journalists who really try to stick to having their social platforms be just fact based…And that’s fine because that might work for them. For me, I feel like the reason why people tapped into me is because not only did I present whatever story I was working on or whatever information I had, but I did so in a way that was authentic to who I was and was relatable. That seemed to be what my brand has always been: being authentic [and] being unapologetically me, but also being factual and presenting the information that people want to know.
What is your advice to journalists and creators looking to get into this space: For anyone up and coming in this space, I would definitely tell them that one: never lose who you are because that’s important. The more that we are starting to see social platforms and content creators take off, the more we realize that people are really going to relate with what resonates with them. And so being yourself is so important. Don’t lose that [and] anything that makes you feel funny when you sleep at night is probably not something that you want to associate yourself with…But also, there’s no limit to creativity. I think over the last 10 years I’ve done maybe 50 to 60 different things creatively and some have worked and some haven’t, but it’s the fact that you have to try it.
The way that algorithms and things work in the social space, something could be a hit today and two months later, no one’s thinking about it. Always be willing to be adaptable change or not necessarily change, but improve and be willing to step outside of the box to do things..Adaptability is definitely something that I would share with any young up and coming journalist.
Screen time: 12 hours.
How did you start building your personal brand on social: I got into social media because none of my friends in high school cared about basketball as much as I did and they stopped answering my text messages about it. I had to go out and find freaks like me on Twitter, and once I started having fun and making friends online I kept going with it.
How would you describe your approach to content creation: I’m here for vibes, jokes and highlights – but I think my best work is when I can let my passion for the game and its athletes shine through. I’m never going to be as smart as coaches or players on X’s and O’s, but I think I’m good at describing why someone is easy to root for, what makes a person interesting or why an event was monumental.
What you are most excited for this season: I promise if I had a favorite team I’d tell you! But I don’t. Probably because they’ve all bullied me online at some point (I see you, 2x champs). I’m really excited for both sides of the rookies vs. vets battle, though. Are the new kids as good as advertised? But more importantly, can the vets show us why the W is a different level from college?
Screen time (how long are you on your phone per day?): 9.5 hours last week.
What does content creation mean to you: Covering the WNBA and covering women’s basketball is a public service because there are legions and legions of fans that have been essentially underserved for a very long time. And this is an opportunity to give them, the fans, coverage that women’s sports and women’s basketball should be getting. If we want to talk about the spirit of equality and equity and what that all means. And so I was gonna put my head right into this. I was gonna dive right in.
What you are most excited for this season: What I’m most excited for is actually seeing which pop cultural icons and other folks come to WNBA games. That’s gonna be something that I will be all over because obviously Caitlin Clark has brought so many eyes to the sport. You know that Beyonce sent Dawn Staley a huge flower basket, I believe. And there have been many WNBA players, including New York’s own Betnijah Laney, who has been trying to advocate to get Beyonce at Barclays Center for a Liberty game…I’m looking forward to who is gonna come to games. I’m looking forward to how the ratings are going to grow. I’m looking forward to more Aces vs Liberty battles. I mean, those are the best, right?
Screen time: 4 hours and 8 minutes.
How did you start building your personal brand on social: The Girls Talk Sports TV brand is built off of three pillars where athletes can be seen, heard and valued. I built my brand off of the aspect that women’s sports only receive less than 4% of all media coverage and less than 1 percent of that representation in newsrooms are black women. So those three aspects was important to me when I was building my brand, but also building community was super important, especially in the digital space. For me, I’ve always been a hands-on game grower, especially in my community in terms of with helping with youth basketball programs and the nonprofit sector. So for me, building a brand was all about just being true to myself, but also just true to that aspect of wanting to be a community builder.
What you are most excited for this season: I’m most excited to see the athletes in the spotlight where they need to be. I’m excited to see not only casual fans, but new fans get to know these athletes through their game, but also through the off the court storytelling. I think that women’s sports is more than just a moment, it’s a movement and it’s at its inflection point right now. And I’m just excited for not only the athletes to get what they deserve in terms of the coverage and the spotlight, but also for the people that are doing the storytelling to get bigger opportunities.
Screen time: 15 hours per day.
How would you describe your approach to content creation: What’s unique is I’ve been a photographer, but I’ve also been a social media manager for my jobs. And so I think what I bring with photos is being able to bring storytelling into my like social media platforms with my photos. So when I take photos, especially on the women’s side, and I share them, I really try to share, like using the captions and words, I try to tell stories about these players or about these teams and programs. Using my photos, not just you know, dropping the photos is like, Hey, look at these cool photos. It’s like, Hey, look at these photos. And here’s some interesting thing about these women, or here’s something like here’s a crazy game that this player had, and really try to connect the stories to the photos using my social media platforms.
Favorite photo: I probably have a bit of recency bias here because I just recently followed Iowa and Caitlin Clark on like their tournament run. I’m also from Iowa. So that was like extra special for me. So I would probably say, the Caitlin Clark trophy Kobe photo was probably one of my favorites just because I got to pay homage to like Kobe and a very well-known photographer while also showing like Caitlin’s greatness with three back to back the Big 10 titles. I would say that’s probably my favorite. But again, there’s some recency bias there. I think another special one of Caitlin is just like her with her arm stretched out and her tongue out which was like a signature Caitlin move. That’s a really special one to me because it was like the first game of the Big 10 tournament and it shows her personality. I think that’s one of the marks special things about her is like the personality that she has on the court. So, being able to tell that through my photos, I think is really special.
What you are most excited for this season: I’m honestly excited for the new faces in the League and the new fans that it’s going to bring, I think that the WNBA is at a true turning point in regards to the attention that it’s getting and the excitement and buzz around it. And so I think I’m most excited to see, like the records that this season breaks the history that we get from the season that I think will be talked about for decades to come. I’m excited to see this like new generation of fans see this league and how special it is and how special the players are and the level of talent that are in this league. I’m just, it’s honestly the most excited I’ve been for a season in a really long time, I think that this is going to be I think the 2024 season is something that we’re gonna look back on as like a needle mover in regards to the WNBA. So I’m very excited for that.
Screen Time: 9 hours and 12 minutes.
How did you get into covering the WNBA: I had a background in marketing long before I became a journalist. I was actually a content marketing manager right before I transitioned into sports full time. But essentially, I just, when I decided I wanted to transition to sports, I really wanted to look for a place that needed more authentic stories. And a really good friend of mine suggested the WNBA because he knew I was a good storyteller. And he also knew that, you know, the League needed some more storytelling. So once I just opted in certain covering games, I was hooked. And I’ve been here ever since.
What’s your approach to content creation: Once I [started] really focusing on women’s basketball, the following kept coming really quick, and it just escalated I would say in the last couple of weeks. I got the awesome chance to go to the WNBA draft. And in the middle of the draft, I went viral…It’s just been a fun ride to be able to lean into that and keep going.
What are you most excited about this season: I think it’s for everyone to kind of see what I’ve been seeing. I think when I when I got to the WNBA last season, I was kicking myself because I’m like, Where have I been like? Why did I not get here sooner?…To see the League growing and then women’s college basketball growing and now they’re kind of colliding in real-time with this exponential growth, I’m so excited for anyone to get to come to a game or watch a game on TV or really just enjoy the League. The [W] is super, super talented.
Screen time: 10 hours and 33 minutes a day.
How did you get into content creation: If I’m being honest, it was kind of an accident. It was something that I kind of fell into. I love women’s basketball [and] I’ve always been tweeting about it on Twitter cause that’s just what I do. Posting about it on Instagram and stuff just naturally—it’s just something that I’ve been in love with since I was a little girl. I noticed that I had like a following and I would say stuff and I see people repeating it and people would be latching on to some of the things I say.
What’s your approach to your content: It’s authentically me. I mean, in every sense of the word. At this point, people will be able to tell if I’m not being authentically me and then they’re going to be like, Oh no, we’re not messing with you no more. So at this point [for] my brand, it has to be.
Screen time: 4 hours and 31 minutes.
How did you get into being on social: I’m a sports writer more than I’m a content creator. I think it comes with the territory when you’re on social media. The only social media app I have is Twitter. I’ll do funny memes and stuff like that…I’ve tried to leverage it to grow my platform and share my work.
What are you most excited for this season: I think, like everybody, this new draft class, there’s just so much talent, but also, you know, NIL changed things so much that they’re more well known than say other rookies who have come in. They’ve already established platforms. They already have their own brands. They already have their own followings. So, all of that bringing it into the League is like this injection of excitement. I know women’s sports seems to be exploding right now and they are, but this WIC was led a long time ago. Now we’re just seeing the explosion from it. It’s been slowly building to this. And I wanna see how that translates over to the season [and] how the WNBA can capitalize on it.
Thoughts on content creation: Seeing now, especially since I first got into sports writing, so many more people who are contributors, who are writers, who are content creators in the space now is awesome. There’s just so much coverage happening on different levels and in different creative ways. As someone who’s been around for a little while, it’s really cool to see.
Screen time: I watch a lot of games on my phone or tablets or whatever if they’re not on television. But with social media, I try to take breaks on the weekends.
How did you get into content creation: I came across tunnel fits, I want to say like two years ago, and decided to make a video about it. I ended up making a few but they did really well, surprisingly well, and that kind of made me think like, oh my goodness…I just decided to kind of start talking about it here and there and I did the same thing with NWSL. The more I did it, the more I realized that: A, there’s people watching this and love to see the videos and they’re commenting on it and everything. But there’s also the people who are like, oh my gosh, like I had no clue this was a thing, didn’t know tunnel fits were a thing, didn’t know about these players, yada yada. And that kind of made me want to pursue it.
What’s your approach to building your brand: Once I realized that there was kind of a niche for women’s sports, I decided to really expand it and kind of give myself the job to cover everything. And I think it has coincided really well with the rise of women’s sports because I started [in] 2022, maybe ’21. That’s kind of when we saw like this big push to get to where we are now. So it’s been really cool because with that growth, I’ve also been growing as a creator. And there was a little bit of a switch in the fall of last year, where brands started coming to me and all these platforms saying, ‘We want you to make content. We love what you’re doing. We want you to do it for us.’ And that’s kind of honestly how I built it into a career today.
Screen time: 8 hours.
What your approach to building your brand on social media: I’m a freelancer. And what that means is that most big stories are being covered by beat writers or staff writers will say, not always in women’s sports, and particularly the W that’s obviously been growing, and we’re seeing a massive change ahead of this season. But I would say that most of my time covering this League has been really trying to convince publications, that there’s an audience for this. And what has been successful for me is trying to find angles that aren’t, you know, this sports journalism market is really oversaturated. And so for me, either going to try to find a really unique angle that no one has covered.
An example I can think of that’s probably my biggest story to date was I wrote for Sports Illustrated about nonbinary athletes and where they fit and Layshia Clarendon was kind of the focus, the centerpiece of that story. That was in 2021 and that was a space that no one had entered. We were starting to talk about trans athletes, but non-binary athletes really weren’t being talked about. And so that was like a place I could enter. I think also trying to pitch women’s publications things about women’s athletes. I’ve been in the New York Times several times, and I’ve never been published in the sports section, right? I’m really creative about whether I’m writing about in-game proposals for the vows section, or I’m writing about WNBA fashion for like the opinion section. I’ve always tried to be really, really creative about where and how and bringing my coverage and what other communities might be overlapping aside from score.
What are you most excited about this season: The W was really my entry point into becoming a basketball fan and what I loved was how many athletes were queer. I’m like, Oh, I’m queer. And I love their heart and I love rooting for them and seeing them be amazing. I think the women’s soccer team, we hear a lot about that and lesbian spaces, but the W has like been really overlooked I think for a long time…I think to me, that’s really cool—finding people who are not only invested in the game, but can find other reasons to buy in…I’ve loved all of the shit talking before the season. I love all the fact that everyone’s already getting chippy…I’m just excited to watch people see what the W really is.
Screen time: 4 hours and 32 minutes.
How did you get into sports media: In addition to creating content, I’m a journalist, host and producer, so I am really a jack of all trades. I can do many things, including content creation. I started my career off at ESPN on the business side, and after three and a half years, I realized I wanted to do something different. I wanted to storytell. I wanted to be around people. And I didn’t want to be in my cubicle anymore. I was at the headquarters in Connecticut, and I wanted to bet on myself, so I decided to do that and that changed my life. I really have kind of built this sort of lane for myself. I never saw anybody who looked like me doing what I’m doing. And it’s been a lot of learning along the way.
What’s your approach to building your brand: In every single space and I show up as me. I’m proud of who I am. Part of my journey, it has not been easy at all and I never tell folks that it has been easy but I’m also proudly Dominican and Puerto Rican and you know that’s a huge part of my identity. I’ve realized [that] the more I lean into that, the more I celebrate myself and people who look like me, the more opportunities come.
What are you most excited about this season: There’s a lot of change within the teams— Natasha Cloud in Phoenix, Skylar Diggins-Smith in Seattle, Candace Parker retired. All these changes within women’s basketball. Change can be really good and I’m excited to just see all the competition. There are a lot of eyes, a lot of young players from Caitlin Clark to Angel Reese to Kamilla Cardoso. There’s a lot of excitement right now.
Screen time: 7 hours and 18 minutes.
How did you get into content creation: What has always been important to me was taking the access that I had from being in these spaces [as a sports writer] and finding ways to get that information to the fans. I started just by live tweeting all these press conferences because they weren’t on TV and I knew that fans wanted to know what these players were saying. I guess my brand kind of grew out of that and since then I’ve gotten to write about so many players in the League…It all started with just trying to share and tell stories and the brand, whatever my following has come from there has kind of all grown from that.
Favorite WNBA team: I think so much of my job is easier when things are going well, but the longer I’m in this space and the more players that I get to know and the more that there’s just so much movement in the league that I’m rooting for these players that I’ve built connections with. So now I’ve got players on every single team that I’m rooting for because I know them personally on some level, but I also am just rooting for kind of the overall League success.
Anything else you’d like to add: To have a League that’s majority queer women, to have a League that’s majority Black women and to know that these are spaces, that those stories are very rarely told. And to be aware of my privilege as a white man in this space, but to be able to use whatever platform I have to be able to amplify those stories is really important to me. It’s an honor for me.
How did you get into content creation: It was really something that just randomly happened back in 2018 or so. First of all, I was always a fan of the WNBA and, back in around 2019, a few people reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, we see these opportunities. We think you’ll be good for it. You’re always talking about sports.’…I was like, ‘I don’t have a journalism background.’ I was working in finance, doing the whole corporate America thing at that time And I was like, Okay, I’ll give it a try. And it really just snowballed from there. Went [from] just starting out as a writer and then it grew to working in social and then to being an on-camera host and a photographer. I’ve been able to do a lot of things just by me [and] someone taking a chance on me and thinking that I would be good for the job.
What’s your approach to building your brand: I think what a lot of people enjoy, for me is just, I won’t say hottakes or anything, and I don’t think I’m a comedian, but a lot of people just think that, Oh my God, you’re so hilarious...People just always think that it’s been something of just a breath of fresh air when it comes to especially the women’s sports space surrounding women’s basketball. They just really love my following, or what I’ve done, whether it be written work or on air work or photography, or just something as simple as live-tweeting about the game. I’ve always just made sure that I try to stay true to me, right? Things that I like, I just share that with people. I don’t try to be anyone else. I’m always me. I talk about being late for traveling, food, sneakers and sports. And that’s what I love and for some reason, it resonates with everyone else. They [see] that I have a real life apart from what it is that I do for work.
What are you most excited about this season: This season, I’m really just looking forward to competitive basketball. I’m looking forward to seeing these amazing women being able to play on such a larger stage. We know that over the past few years, women’s basketball and the attention that is received has been on the uptick and, you know, we’re familiar with it. We’ve been here. We’ve been in the trenches covering it. And so now I’m excited that everyone else is finally starting to take notice to something that we’ve known or I’ve known has been great for just so many years. So, that’s what I’m really looking forward to. And I think that this new wave of talent that’s coming in, they’re ready to compete and I’m all for it.
Screen time: 9 hours and 50 seconds.
What’s your approach to building your brand on social media: I think my biggest thing is that I’ve always been unapologetically me. I remember in grad school, one of my professors had said to me, ‘When you become a professional, you have to keep your biases aside.’ But you look at certain broadcasters or radio personnel, who they root for. I think that’s been my biggest thing. I know, too, that I am a little bit of an overshare. I kind of share both the good and the bad of my life, the industry and people really resonate with that because it isn’t all roses. People always say [that] social media is a highlight reel, but I try to be super real with things. And so I’m just kind of a goofy person, I try not to take things too seriously, but also in the same breath, when life gets me down I share that with other people because I think that it’s really important to share that things aren’t perfect all the time.
I think that’s kind of how I built my personal brand. It’s just being true and open and honest all the time. And at the end of the day, I’m still a sports fan. I think that’s the biggest thing, too, is that a lot of the time you see reporters and they’re doing their job, of course, but they’re just tweeting things that are professional and I think I have a lot of fun with it. I still am a fan. At the end of the day, even when I’m covering the WNBA, when you see a sick player or a sick shot, you want to enjoy it the way you would as a regular fan. Yes, reporting is my job. And when I’m going to [do] a story, I’m going to do it without bias, but I still want to enjoy the game. Enjoy the players, enjoy the teams the same way any fan would…Yes, I think I’m good at my job and I try to be as professional and unbiased in my work, but at the end of the day, I’m still a fan and I like to pass on with it. That’s kind of why we all got into sports in the first place.
Thoughts on the growth of women’s sports and content creation: Thank you guys for showcasing these creators. I think it’s huge, especially in the women’s sports space. As much as women’s sports has been growing and we’ve seen the data grow and not even just in women’s basketball, but across women’s soccer you’re seeing like the pro leagues for volleyball and things like that…There’s so many people who have been covering the W. This is my fifth season and I still feel like a rookie because there’s been people who have had boots on the ground since the early days. It’s really amazing that you guys put in the work to showcase these incredible women who have been putting in the work since before everybody else saw the vision and now everybody’s catching up.
Screen time: 8 hours and 37 minutes.
When did you get into content creation: I created a Twitter account in like 2018 because I kept going on Twitter to check [game] scores. I figured I might as well create an account, so I just started out as a fan. But I think when I started to get more into the writing side, that’s when I started to meet more people, especially on WNBA Twitter, too. I think the first year that I started covering in 2021, people were very welcoming and it was just a matter of putting myself out there…Just to kind of put my name out there, I would comment on live games, things like that. I would share where the W games are on what channels because as we know, it can be a little bit difficult at times to accept those and so I think just by doing that, and getting my name out there and more people started to see me and they started to follow me as well. I think being from Toronto, too, there are a large number of Raptors fans that are now WNBA fans as well. I think when I moved into that space of covering a W, a lot of the fan base I had built from the Raptors side kind of follow through and move along with me through this journey. I think that’s just how my platform grew and my brand kind of became covering WNBA and women’s basketball as well as tennis because that’s also my other main sport that I love to watch and to cover.
What are you most excited about this season: I’m so excited to see how all the new additions to different teams kind of paired out, like with the Storm getting Skylar and Nneka… I think there was so much movement in the offseason and so I’m very curious to see a lot of players who are now wearing new jerseys after wearing, you know, one jersey for the entirety of their careers. I think that’s going to be really exciting.
Screen time: 5 hours.
What’s your approach to building your brand: Just kind of having fun with it. That’s kind of my biggest thing is just—I know I like to do video content. I like to be on camera, but ultimately for me, it’s just, [do] I want to watch this and do I have fun making it? And normally if I have fun making it, someone’s going to have fun watching it whether that be social media videos or YouTube videos or whatever that might be. Just kind of just having fun with it. And if I can have fun with it, someone else can have fun watching it.
I love women’s basketball. This is what I love to watch. If I wasn’t doing content for it, I would be talking about it the same way, just in a different manner. For me, my biggest inviting factor is the fact that I’m a fan just like everyone else. Yes, I am in the media. Yes, I am credentialed to things, but I’m a fan and I love women’s basketball.
What are you most excited about this season: I think you can feel the different level of excitement for this season coming into it. I’m personally most excited [about] all the new fans to be able to see what we’ve known about and how incredible that this League truly is. And a lot of that has to do with how widespread the talent is and how good I think the teams are this season. I’m ready to see these teams go to war and just have some good games. I’m excited for some real, genuinely good basketball this season.
Screen time: 11 hours.
How did you get into content creation: I think social media—I didn’t realize its power in connection with sports. I think until I was working at The Ringer and I just saw how not only the company’s media presence was important but each individual writer and personality had their own following. I was like, Wow, that’s really cool and I kind of had a talk with myself, OK, what do I want my following to really be about? I don’t want to have my hand in everything. What do I want the people following me to really follow me for?
I remember I went to my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, I was like, I want people when they think of the WNBA, that they mention my name [and] that they have me in those conversations. So, what do I need to do to do that? I learned by sharing my story with my fandom with the WNBA and with the Sacramento Monarchs, really just pulled at the heartstrings of a lot of people…Once I tapped into that fandom, that’s when I started wanting to grow the game by sharing more of those stories and more of those stories about the players as well. I’m not gonna be breaking news, but I want to make sure that players know that they can talk to me and I’m gonna see them as a human.
I’m going to make sure they know that I’ve been here from the beginning and as a former women’s basketball player myself, I see them. I’m not just here for the moment or the movement, I’ve been here.
What would your advice be to people, especially young Black women that are looking to get into the space and questioning whether they should go the traditional media route or content creation: I think having your own brand and going into content creation right now, you have the power to do that. I think that’s both a positive and a negative because sometimes as someone who went to journalism school. I have my degree in this, I’m on the same platform as somebody who has none of those accolades or none of that schooling. You can also just pop up and have your own video and make your own YouTube show, like, the power is very much in the hands of the creator.
[For] the longest time, I was so hesitant and so nervous and looking at a lot of people in the space and saying, well, I can’t do that. I’ll just stay over here or I’ll never get there, I’ll just stay over here.And once I just started and also going into freelance, I just really bet on myself. That is always my advice to young girls, especially young Black girls: you’re always told to stay in this box or stay in this lane or do things that everyone else is doing to get better. When I made the decision to cover the W NBA and women’s basketball, it was very much a, I’m doing something completely different than what you guys are wanting me to do or, you know, just to cover the NBA only. I followed my passion and I said, I have the skill set, I have the knowledge and I’m going to bet on myself.
Screen time: 8 hours.
What’s your approach to building your brand: I think honestly the biggest thing is just authenticity. Anyone who follows me on Twitter, anyone who listens to our podcast, I think you’re always getting me in my truest form. I’m always going to be a fan of my favorite players and I’m always gonna rep the teams and the players that I love while also trying to remain objective and provide insight and analysis and my opinion on things. So I think that rather than like having this perfectly curated brand where everything’s so pristine and whatever, I think I’ve went in the opposite direction where I’ve found that the easiest way to be myself and give people like original unique content is to kind of let that personal fan side come out a little bit more. I think that allows me to access a deeper level of storytelling when I’m writing pieces because it’s more about the person I’m writing about. I’m not as concerned with how it looks or whatever, I just wanna be spreading the stories of these players.
Favorite WNBA team: It’s two answers: the real answer is the Aces, and then the other answer is whatever team Kahleah Copper is currently playing for. For a long time, it’s been the Aces and the Sky, but now I’m gonna have to rep the Mercury, which is gonna be a little weird for me, but wherever Kai goes, I’m gonna be a fan of them. But Aces, you know, Jackie Young and A’ja Wilson are two of my all-time favorites.
Screen time: 4 hours and 20 minutes.
How did you get into content creation: I feel like everyone really started during COVID. I was like, well, I might as well just post some stuff on tiktok because that’s the thing and once school started opening up, I started doing like a little bit of basketball content with the varsity team that I was coaching and that would blow up here and there and then the big blow up was my niece and nephew being as cute as they are. Me being their aunt, it was literally nothing like that special—I mean, it is special to me that I’m their aunt but nothing that special where it was like some big break. It was just like, Wow, that girl loves her niece and nephew.
There was one video I did, it wasn’t even with the kids, it was a dancing video by myself and I kid you not every single comment was like, ‘Get it Auntie Nae! Go Auntie. Yeah, Auntie! I was like, OK, is that my name? Is that what people call me. So, that’s been the thing ever since then.
I’ve always been a fan of the W. I post Detroit Shock throwbacks all the time, but never really had the chance or really never knew l could be someone to talk about it in that way just because I’m not a reporter, I’m not a journalist. I just love the game, love being there. But I was in the right place at the right time: I was in Dallas at the Final Four last year and someone from the League was like, ‘Hey, I’ve seen some of your Tik Toks, I really want you to come to the draft next week…Before going into the draft, I was talking to my wife and I was just like, ‘I’m so scared. I don’t know anybody. I’m not sure how I’m going to be received there because I don’t know if people know me. I don’t want to step on toes. I just wanted to be in experience and all that. And my first interaction walking in, I turned around and I saw Aliyah Boston walking towards me. inside, I’m freaking out, I’m like, Oh my God, it’s Aliyah...That’s the moment I was like, OK, maybe I am supposed to be here.
What’s been your approach to content creation and building your brand: I don’t take a different approach at all with my personal versus my professional brand. I think that if you remain consistent, your audience knows where you are, what you’re going to do. And so by me just authentically wanting to really get to the meat of the story and get to know the players as humans, it’s beyond just rapid fire, right?… People want to get to know people but it doesn’t have to be those quick hitting things. I think I do a great job of long-form, get to know you content, as opposed to short form heavy hitting. I mean, I can do the short form but I keep that consistent in how I talk to people as humans and meet them where they are as humans with the way I tell stories. My personal brand, you see a lot of athletes just having fun, getting real, and just being open and trusting and vulnerable and recognized as a privilege. They feel comfortable enough to do that. And then you see that when I take it to a professional setting, I have a show with the WNBA called Off Top and that’s where we just sit down [and] I don’t have a preconceived notion of what I want to talk about. I just say, Hey, welcome to my Big Comfy Couch. And I let them take it where they want to take it. So I, no matter what I do between my purpose, personal brand or professional brand, I want to open up space for people to be themselves. And I want to facilitate that conversation in a way that it sticks with the general masses, and amplify that I’ve been a cheerleader to my core. And that’s what I bring in my journalism, too.
What are you most excited about this season: I’m really excited to see players take ownership of their stories. I’m really excited to see them step into a landscape that is ready to fully digest the fact that they belong there. And for them to be celebrated the way they’ve always deserved. And because of the empowerment around the game right now. It allows players to show up as fully themselves. So whether that’s translating by how they play basketball stylistically, or how they dress in the tunnel, or how they communicate their stories with media. I’m just excited about the individuality being showcased this season…
I want the general public to not be reliant on the bigger names and really know that when you look around in that locker room. For the W, there are 11 or 12 players in there. Every single person’s story matters. And so going into this season, every single person’s story should be told because we have so many more eyes on it. What I fear is that the legacy players, the players who have been around the super vets, they’re gonna be overshadowed in that. I want media to know like, it’s our responsibility to tell that history and it’s our responsibility to really go out and showcase the excellence. We have greats stepping away, [like] that Candace Parker retirement, which crushed me. And I never thought we gave her enough credit for how transformative she was. I’m a big Candace Parker and really I’m very underwhelmed about that. But like I don’t think we ever gave her enough credit about how transformative she was. And I want these vets [that] decide to step down and step away from the game, an active player role, for them to feel like they’ve been appreciated their entire career. And so, whether that’s us reconciling and having this heavy reconciliation in pushing their stories forward in a way we haven’t before, that’s what we need to do. We need to make the effort to really push them in to knowing that their flowers are there and they should receive them.
Screen time: 9 hours and 37 minutes.
How did you get into content creation: I’ve always been obsessed with creating content. Even in high school, I had an anonymous Twitter page covering my high school sports. And then when I got to college, I was covering Wichita State Athletics [and] men’s Basketball was like, the biggest thing in the city. This was in 2016, 2017, I was so adamant about using my own social media or like different social media channels to promote our coverage, like the newspaper and everything. Long story short, I was told that using my social media is unprofessional and it wouldn’t get me anywhere. But I really didn’t listen to that. And that’s when I started Sports with Aliyah my junior year of college, and that’s where I’m like, Okay, I’m gonna write articles, do interviews, create content on my terms, and I know I can create an audience that likes me for me and my coverage.
From there, Sports with Aliyah has just grown so much. It was a talk show in Wichita— I’d love to get back to that—but a talk show or just going to any sports-related thing I could possibly go to and just show it from my point of view. I love focusing on things that make the athletes more human instead of just like their stats, like, I want to know their personal stories, I want to show their personalities. I also love the way basketball intersects with fashion, music culture, that’s just my favorite thing.
And when it comes to women’s sports, a lot of people saw me covering women’s sports as like a charity, like, Oh, that’s so nice that you’re covering the women’s game, too. And I’m like, ‘It’s not nice. It’s what I want to do.’ This is what I’m passionate about. That’s kind of how I approached it in my content. I have a lot of men’s sports fans following me, but I would just continue to talk about women’s basketball, women’s sports very casually [and adding] it in with my normal content, instead of just being like, Guys, look, I’m doing such a great thing by covering women’s sports. I’m just like, Yeah, this is what I’m talking about and get with it. And I think that’s kind of how I’ve kind of converted some men’s sports fans into liking women’s sports, and it’s been just integrated into my life at this point.
What’s been your approach to building your personal brand: My approach has always been community first and not getting wrapped in with the numbers. I mean, it’s social media, things can go viral left and right. But what are you doing to sustain it? I’ve always valued a community, that’s why I started a group chat with my followers to help them break into sports or talk about sports. Community is everything and then also just capitalizing off of what makes me unique in the space. The human stories or the culture, I like to make a big deal out of the little things. I like to show what a normal broadcast wouldn’t show, those small moments between a player and a fan. Or, two players having a nice moment. I want to show things that you can’t see by just reading an article or watching ESPN or the broadcast. I think that’s been my key.
Screen time: 8-9 hours.
How did you get into content creation: I feel like TikTok really became big my senior year of high school. [In] college, I had a very small platform, not really a lot of followers, but it just gave me a place to be creative and post about my life, post about being a student-athlete. I grew up watching a lot of YouTube and I feel like YouTube is definitely tedious, so having a platform where you can kind of share more short form videos and it’s an easier lift was really appealing to me. I kind of just got started there.
I also am a journalist, so I do some more traditional work, but I feel like TikTok is a place for me to kind of have my own little community and be a little bit more creative and do some untraditional things, whether it be sharing my opinions or doing fun interviews. That is really how I got into it and I’ve continued to post around big sporting events and just kind of giving my takes or getting opportunities to interview players and my platform has grown from there.
What’s your approach to building your brand: I think reporting and being a journalist is a huge part of my brand and I always want that to be the first thing that is conveyed when I’m posting and sharing online, but also sharing that fun side of me and knowing that a lot of these student-athletes who I’m interviewing, especially in college, are similar in age to me and probably people that I could be friends with if I wasn’t working because I was also a student-athlete. So, I totally get the ins and outs of what they’re going through. Trying to combine that perspective in the interviews, in my content, I think reaches them a little bit more because they’re human, too. They have their favorite artists off the court. They have hobbies that they like to do. I think it’s just a really good way for me to connect with these athletes.
Screen time: 5 hours.
How did you get into content creation: I had already been in the queer content creation space…Soccer’s always been my thing and that’s the thing I knew the most about—the intersection of queer and World Cup content. I was able to make like a bunch of like breakdown videos with the World Cup and now I just talk about sports and kind of try and make women’s sports as accessible as possible to as many people and tell the kind of human interest stories behind everything that happens. [It]s] just kind of the stuff I already am interested in and now I get to talk about it on TikTok.
What’s your approach to content creation: I think that a lot of it is that I think that I’ve created a community of people that watch my videos, they care about women’s sports, they care about women’s basketball, they care about what’s going on, and I like being around those people. And so it’s just kind of like, I, in my life, have had friends who I talk to about things happening in the W or things happening in the sports world. And now it’s like, I have a giant community of those people and like so many more friends to talk about…The thing that I always come back to is just like, I wanna grow the conversation and that kind of is the driving force [in] how many more friends can I get to talk about women’s basketball and all that, everything with?
Favorite WNBA team: I’m a DC girl. I’m excited for Aaliyah [Edwards]…that is gonna be exciting for us for the Mystics.
Screen time: 9 hours and 15 minutes.
How did you get into content creation: I have always been very vocal and extroverted and somebody that’s been taking pictures since I was a young age. I always felt that sharing videos [and] pictures as well as my thoughts as a way of bringing people into my life and I guess I never thought of myself as a content creator, I always just thought of myself that was kind of sharing what was going on in my life…
I’ve always just cared about curating. I would say not only an image, but not an image or a brand, but authenticating and showcasing my life, what I’m doing, what I aspire for, how I can help other people, how we can bring more people in. So I would say on Instagram, I really want us to just showcase the ups and downs, but also the possibilities for everybody in their life…On Twitter, which is the app that I have the most following on, I just talk. I’ve always been very vocal and I’ve always wanted to share how my background in African American studies and history has allowed me to look at a lot of things a bit more critically and provide some insight as well as my own personal feelings and thoughts.
What are you most excited about this season: The competition, the outfits, the brand deals that clients get. I think that the Liberty have the best court side experience with the Crown Club, with celebrities that come to games. It’s immaculate. I’m excited for the film pictures that I’m going to take this year—I think I’ve really found my lane in regards to capturing things between my phone and my cameras, and really being able to support W and be a face of the League and people know.
We get down in New York. I’ve been called the mayor. I wouldn’t consider myself as such, but it’s fun to know that when people are coming to game in New York, they know they’re gonna see me and that I’m gonna bring that energy to every game.
Screen time: 4-6 hours a day.
What’s do you think makes your content unique on social: I really like looking at and understanding personal development: why is a player growing? How did they adapt over an offseason? What did they start seeing differently? It’s amazing watching the consistency that they grow into, and understanding them as players and people is what I’m all about.
What are you most excited about this season: I’m excited about a plethora of things, but I’m most excited to watch the Seattle Storm find their way as a team this year. There’s so much talent coming together, and I can’t wait to watch Noelle Quinn fit everything together
Screen time: It’s around 8 in the off-season and then about 11.5 or 12 on average in-season.
