The StudBudz are thinking more about the future. Just a year ago, the former Minnesota Lynx teammates and viral livestreaming sensations competed in a league with a maximum salary of $249,244. Now, thanks to the WNBA’s latest collective bargaining agreement, players are signing multi-million dollar contracts for the first time in its 30-year-history.

“It changed my life. My mama, she’s able to retire now,” Courtney Williams, who reportedly signed a two-year, $2.4 million max contract with the Lynx this April, tells me. “It just feels like whatever I want or whatever they want, we could just get now.”

“I feel like now, with the money that I am getting, it’s helping me with my goals in the future,” Natisha Hiedeman, who signed with the Seattle Storm in April on a two-year, $1.5 million contract, adds. “In the past, they maybe seemed far-fetched but now it’s like, no, I could do that.”

But practicality aside, what did they splurge on with their new salaries? Hiedeman bought a chain and Williams admits she may be spending some of her money on girls. “Money makes these women go. That’s all I’m going to say,” she laughs. “I was kind of wondering how these NBA dudes was doing it, but now I completely understand.”

If you’re a newer fan to the WNBA, you might think it’s long been like this — a place where two gay, masc-of-center women can make millions playing ball, and be as outrageous as they are out. But in a league with a more heteronormative past than its current reputation might suggest, Williams and Hiedeman represent a new era of inclusion and authenticity — one they have helped build, one livestream at a time.

It’d be a wildly impressive accomplishment by any standards — even more so when you consider they’ve only been the StudBudz for a year.

In 2019, after initially being drafted to the Minnesota Lynx, a young rookie from Marquette University named Natisha Hiedeman eventually ended up on the Connecticut Sun. There, she met Courtney Williams, then in her fourth season in the W. “I don’t want to say it was one moment, but when she first got there, I invited her to my birthday,” Williams recalls, when asked for her first impression of Hiedeman. “She was the only one I invited off the team. She’s the only one I feel like can match the type of energy I’m about to be on.”

That night included a visit to Foxwoods Resort Casino. “I just remember it was crazy because I went to her birthday party and then I got in trouble the next day,” Hiedeman remembers. “They didn’t want me to have no fun, I guess. I got in trouble the next day, but I ain’t care because you know what? That’s a memory. It’s a core memory, eight years later.”

“She shouldn’t have got in trouble,” Williams opines today. “Eight years ago, the W was overly strict. It was just doing too much. What we did is a light night in the W now.”

Immediately, the duo became friends. But it wasn’t until they both signed with the Lynx in 2024, after Williams had done stints on the Atlanta Dream and Chicago Sky, that they really “locked in.” Williams recalls their conversation when they found out they’d be on the same team again: “We’re going to have to really lean on each other because we’re walking into a new environment, but we know we’re gonna vibe, so we’re just going to have to rock out together.”

Once they got to Minneapolis, Hiedeman and Williams became best friends. It was there that the idea for the StudBudz was born — a way to feed a growing WNBA audience who was hungry for an uproarious, behind-the-scenes look at life in the league. While Williams came up with the idea to livestream, Hiedeman gets the credit for the StudBudz nickname, which centers the word “stud,” a term used to refer to Black masculine-of-center lesbians and sapphics of all genders.

They started streaming virtually “every day but game day,” Hiedeman tells me. They did live commentary for other teams’ games, they sang karaoke, they talked shit. Often. They streamed “everything and anything.” A subscriber goal led them to dye their hair pink — a decision that would come to define their aesthetic. “Courtney was like, if we get so many subscribers, I’ll dye my hair whatever color T’s hair is, and then it was pink and then that kind of just became our thing,” Hiedeman says.

But the lore goes deeper than that. Hiedeman’s hair had only been shaved and dyed pink because of the sort of chaos they routinely get into together, even offstream. “It was such a hard day at practice,” Hiedeman tells me of the day she went pink. “[Head coach] Cheryl [Reeve] was on our asses. It was like the point guards couldn’t do no right. I was gone. I didn’t even take no extra shot, nothing. I just left.” There was only one person to turn to. “I called [Courtney]. I had the clippers to my head.” And like any good friend, Williams was nothing but supportive.

“I’m the wrong person to call when you talk about cutting hair,” Williams, who chopped all of her hair off while playing overseas in Australia in 2017 remembers. “I said, ‘Just do it and start fresh. We had a rough one. Just cut it off for the both of us.’”

Hiedeman ran the clippers. “It felt great. I felt like a new individual with a breath of fresh air. But then it was just dark and short, it just wasn’t giving, I don’t know,” she recounts. One thing led to another and the iconic pink hair came to be. Once Williams also dyed her hair pink, the look became synonymous with the StudBudz. Last year, the Minnesota Lynx gave away pink wigs to fans at their final regular season home game as an homage to the iconic duo.

“It flooded the whole arena,” Hiedeman remembers. “Yeah, that was cold.”

The moment felt like a kind of coronation. “We definitely cried. We just couldn’t believe it. We was like, bro, we really popping it,” Williams says. “We really finna do something.”

The StudBudz have a funny way of making non-WNBA fans into WNBA fans, and of turning WNBA fans into WNBA superfans. Nothing demonstrates the sheer contagiousness of their friendship more than their marathon 2025 All-Star Weekend livestream in Indianapolis — a media event that unironically belongs in history books.

I must confess I watched at home on my computer every night, in absolute awe, unable to believe the kind of unvarnished and unprecedented access Williams and Hiedeman were offering. The StudBudz showed us Sydney Colson of the Las Vegas Aces grinding on fellow players, Cheryl Reeve getting down on the dance floor, and even WNBA Commissioner Cathy Englebert playfully yelling at them to “behave” from her Uber as the pair rode their scooters through Indianapolis. And, of course, there was Hiedeman shamelessly flirting with Angel Reese, then playing on the Chicago Sky. It was probably the closest we’d ever gotten to a WNBA reality TV show. I sent play-by-play updates to my friend Ashley while she was at a concert, and seconds after she got out of the show, she FaceTimed me so I could hold the phone up to my computer screen while she walked home. We did not want to miss a single thing. (It’s not a coincidence that a few months later, Ashley and I would go on to start our own podcast about the WNBA.)

The StudBudz racked up thousands and thousands of new followers that weekend. Hiedeman admits to telling Williams, “This might be the best weekend of my life.”

“It felt like every night it was a hit,” Williams remembers. “We was turned up every night.” Amid all the “club, bus, another club” craziness, even Diplo showed up — and hilariously, the StudBudz did not recognize him. But if you think they’re going to tone it down at the 2026 All-Star Weekend in Chicago this July, now that they’ve got followers and more lucrative contracts, you don’t know the StudBudz. “I want to party harder,” Hiedeman says. For her part, Williams hopes they can recapture the same mayhem; she doesn’t want anyone to try “to duck the camera and be trying to act all shy and stuff like that.” (I think I speak for every sapphic WNBA fan when I say I don’t want that either.)

This is technically my third check-in with Williams and Hiedeman. The first time, a few short months after they started their channel, the StudBudz nearly brought me to tears laughing about memes, MySpace, and baddies, for our Search History interview series. It was clear even then that they were the real deal: What you see with them is what you get. None of their dynamic was being faked for the livestream.

Then in December, when I travelled to Miami for Unrivaled — the new women’s 3x3 basketball league, co-founded by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier — we met face to face. You might have seen the viral clips of Hiedeman telling me all about “Shot Callin” by YoungBoy Never Broke Again and “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan, or Williams confidently singing some off-key Olivia Dean.

This time, they’re separated by distance, Hiedeman calling from Seattle where she has a view of Mt. Rainier from her apartment, and Williams calling from a rainy Minneapolis, where she still plays for the Lynx. They have recently marked the one-year anniversary of the StudBudz, and it’s sinking in how much their lives have changed. “We did so much in a year. I ain’t gonna lie,” Williams tells me.

“I can’t believe it’s only been a year,” Hiedeman adds. “It feels way longer than that.”

This year, Williams is celebrating her 11th season in the WNBA. She got drafted in 2016 as the eighth overall pick by the Phoenix Mercury before eventually being traded to the Connecticut Sun where she played for four seasons and had her fateful first meeting with Hiedeman.

Many players report having a “welcome to the W moment” — a story about realizing they weren’t playing ball in school anymore. For Williams, that was having to guard Allie Quigley as a rookie. “Her release was so fast and I’m looking over at the coach like, ‘Yo, what do you want me to do to guard this girl? I do not know how to guard this girl.’ And there was no answer. I just kept getting killed.”

As we discuss her long tenure in the league, I can’t help but bring up her viral draft picture, which shows a 21-year-old Williams all dolled up with a full face of makeup and long hair. “When I first got to the league, it did feel kind of like, oh, you got to be that girly girl. You’ve got to present yourself in a certain type of way to get the partnerships, to get the brand deals,” Williams tells me. “They had to damn near brainwash me. Had me thinking I couldn’t get drafted unless I was a bad bitch.” But, let’s make one thing clear: “I was a baddie,” she emphasizes.

Hiedeman joined the league in 2019. Her rude awakening? “When BG [Brittney Griner] took my floater out of the air, literally. I thought I had so much time and space and she just grabbed it out the air. Didn’t block it, just grabbed it.” Hiedeman has been “out since birth,” she tells me, and the difference between her experience and Williams, although only separated by a few years, is noticeable. “Yeah, I didn’t change much. I got a better haircut though,” she jokes.

Although the WNBA has always had gay players and fans, progress on LGBTQ+ inclusion was frustratingly slow at first. Founded in 1996 — with its first game taking place in 1997 — the league didn’t have its first publicly out gay player until 2002, when New York Liberty player Sue Wicks came out in an interview. League-wide recognition of Pride did not begin until 2014. But something palpable has shifted in the 2020s. Many players, like Hiedeman, are out before they’re even drafted. The WNBA will promote queer players with cheeky social media trends. Teammates are publicly dating — and sometimes publicly breaking up. And the StudBudz exist. “Now these folks can see me and T and be like, ‘Man, I can come in the league with a fade and go get this money. I can have cornrows. I can like women.’ You don’t have to feel like you can’t just be who you are,” Williams says of their impact.

“You could just really be yourself. The WNBA is so inclusive. There’s so many different types of people,” Hiedeman adds.

It is surreal, when they zoom out, to think about how far the W has come, even since they began playing. Earlier this year, they attended the McDonald’s All-American Game — an annual basketball competition for high-school seniors.

“Some of the players were saying, ‘Oh, they call me Baby Bud,’” Williams says. “And [now] on national TV, you hear people saying ‘the StudBudz’ and it’s like, man, how many white people ain’t even know what a stud was?”

“It doesn’t really get more visible than that. The representation can’t be on a bigger platform than the ones we’ve been on. I definitely take pride in it. I want all the little studdies out there to know like, ‘Hey man, y’all can get it. Don’t feel like you’ve got to conform to nothing. You can really just be who you are and just be good at what you do and not have to worry about everything else. Just worry about being the best basketball player you could be.” Hiedeman co-signs this statement with a big grin.

Although Williams and Hiedeman aren’t playing on the same team anymore, their bond remains as strong as ever. They talk every single day. “I text her about her games. I’m her girl,” Williams jokes. The StudBudz are here to stay. Thank God.

As our conversation comes to an end, I ask them what their favorite thing about each other is. Their love for each other is palpable even on screen with thousands of miles in between them.

“My favorite thing about my friend is that she is just the sweetest person ever. She is the type of person where it’s like she just loves trees and nature and animals and recycling. If you just meet a genuine person that just loves humans and nature, it’s her,” Williams tells me of Hiedeman.

“I’m crying,” Hiedeman responds. “Mine about Courtney is when she cares about you, there’s no length that she won’t go to. The way she supports all her family, friends, everybody who she cares about. It made me do that more. She just got all her people’s back. It’s the loyalty.”

Photography Photographer: Bobby Rogers Digital Technician: Aaron Rice PA: Fadumo Ali

Styling Wardrobe Stylist: Clarke Imani Assistant Stylist: Takeva Thomas

Fashion Courtney Williams’ Look: Khy Puffer Vest, Coach Denim, Coach Shoes, Prada Sunglasses Natisha Hiedeman’s Look: Wizzolx Tulip Jacket, Coach Tee, Helmut Lang Pants, Loewe Sunglasses, Koolinxz Necklace

Talent Talent Coordinator: Tenzin Dekyi

Editorial Managing Editor, Them: Samantha Allen Audience Editor, Them: Ana Osorno Graphic Designer: Mariusz Walus Senior Vice President, Editorial, equalpride: Kayla Gagnet Vice President, Audience & Digital Marketing, equalpride: Stephanie Williams

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Originally Appeared on them.