Culture
Paige Bueckers becomes first NIL athlete to launch Nike player edition sneaker
UConn star Paige Bueckers continues to make history.
On Monday, Nike named Bueckers as the first name, image and likeness athlete to design and launch a player edition sneaker, with the brand debuting Bueckers’ Nike G.T. Hustle 3 on Saturday.
“It’s definitely motivating to wear your own shoe,” Bueckers said in a statement. “I grew up wearing Nikes — all the signature shoes — so it’s surreal to have this player edition model. I just want to show out in it.”
The sneaker features details personal to the 2021 Naismith Player of the Year. The area codes for Storrs, Conn., and Bueckers’ hometown in Minnesota intersect on the left tongue, and a text bubble with the phrase “Be You, Be Great” is printed on the left heel as a nod to the message she receives from her father before every game. “Bueckers” is printed on the right heel.
Bueckers first signed an NIL deal with Nike in September 2023, adding the apparel company to a lengthy list of deals with companies such as Gatorade, Dunkin’, Bose and Chegg.
In August, Bueckers also signed an NIL deal with Unrivaled, the new winter 3×3 professional league co-founded by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier. She became the first NCAA athlete to receive ownership equity in a league. She is expected to play in the league next year.
Bueckers’ playing future has been a recent topic of conversation following the 2025 WNBA Draft Lottery in mid-November. The Dallas Wings won the lottery, allowing them to select Bueckers No. 1 if the Huskies star declares for April’s draft.
Bueckers is a redshirt senior, though she still could return to UConn for an additional season after receiving an extra year of eligibility because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Bueckers told The Athletic this summer that she planned for this college season to be her last, and she later shared in a social media post that she was taking part in her last UConn media day this fall.
She joins a growing group of women’s basketball players to have design input on Nike sneakers. Jewell Loyd and Jonquel Jones are among WNBA players who unveiled Nike player-exclusive sneakers this past season, while Sabrina Ionescuhas a popular signature sneaker and A’ja Wilson’s will be on the market by the 2025 WNBA season. Caitlin Clark also debuted several player-exclusive sneakers, and she reportedly will receive a Nike signature sneaker in the future as part of an endorsement deal she signed last spring.
Through six games this season, Bueckers, a two-time first-team All-American, is averaging 22 points, 4.5 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game. UConn is undefeated and hosts Holy Cross on Tuesday before playing Louisville in the Women’s Champions Classic at Barclays Center on Saturday.
Required reading
(Photos courtesy of Nike)
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
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