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TAMPA, Fla. — When Paige Bueckers tore her ACL in the summer of 2022, a year after winning Player of the Year honors as a freshman and a few months after leading UConn to its first NCAA Tournament title game since 2016, it left a void in the national women’s basketball landscape. Bueckers had become the face of the sport, and someone would have to fill that role.Bueckers’ fellow Class of 2020 recruit Caitlin Clark ended up assuming that mantle — and then some — helping propel women’s basketball to new heights. After Clark took her star power to the WNBA, Bueckers and USC star JuJu Watkins attracted bicoastal spotlights this season. But now Bueckers has finished her college career. Her theoretical heir, JuJu Watkins, missed most of the tournament with her own ACL injury and could miss the bulk, if not all, of next season.
The game is looking for another face heading into the 2025-26 season. The problem: There is no obvious successor. Talented players abound, but a player who can break through into the national consciousness could be essential to maintaining the unprecedented momentum the sport has gained over the past few seasons.
The most likely successor to Bueckers’ stardom could be on her team. En route to a national championship on Sunday, Sarah Strong was an All-American as a freshman and led the country in total win shares (9.3). She took her game to another level in the postseason, averaging more than 22 points and 13 rebounds over the final three tournament contests. That culminated in a historical final when she became the first man or woman to post at least 20 points, 15 rebounds and five assists in the championship game. Strong can already do essentially everything on a basketball court: defend on the perimeter, protect the rim, screen for her teammates, create her own shot and shoot effectively.
As a sophomore, there is also a long runway ahead with Strong. She can have the basketball world in her hands for multiple years.
The only issue with Strong is that being the face of women’s basketball also entails being a mouthpiece, and Strong’s interviews border on performance art with how little she says. Fans want to feel connected to a player, and there isn’t much to latch on to with Strong off the court, especially when she shows such little emotion on it. In the age of name, image and likeness, Strong’s personality doesn’t exactly lend itself to national ad campaigns that would keep her in the spotlight like Clark, Bueckers and Watkins.
Maybe, then, the responsibility can fall to her teammate Azzi Fudd, the newly minted most outstanding player of the Final Four. Fudd has the pedigree (she was the top recruit in her class) and the comeback story that form a great narrative. The problem with Fudd is that she hasn’t been an All-American or even the best player on her team, and Strong will still be around next year. If Fudd can carry over her NCAA Tournament performance into next season, she’ll be good enough to command more attention but will remain in Strong’s shadow at UConn and nationally.
If Fudd doesn’t have the star power on the court, then the All-America lineup is a good place to search for someone else. Hannah Hidalgo and Madison Booker are two other candidates for best player in the country. Notre Dame is a popular brand, and after the Irish’s dramatic offseason, Hidalgo is set up for a redemption arc. That will require Notre Dame to bring in some serious talent in the transfer portal so that Hidalgo is winning enough games to matter. Booker will be winning at Texas, and the Longhorns have drawn well on national television with her in the lineup. Two of ESPN’s top three regular-season games featured Texas (against LSU and South Carolina). Booker also has an aesthetically pleasing game with her smooth jump shot, making her an easy player to root for.
The final member of the first-team All-America in 2024-25 was Lauren Betts, who possesses a unique dominance. She is a bit of a throwback in terms of her style of play, but that doesn’t make her any less compelling, especially since she has embraced sharing her mental health story with the world. UCLA is another team that figures to be successful in 2025-26, though the Bruins have yet to break through on a national level since the program hasn’t always been relevant during the NCAA Tournament era. Coming off a run to the Final Four, UCLA should have gained more of a following, and Betts will be the beneficiary of that extra interest as the team’s undisputed best player.
Other players are perhaps more magnetic than these stars, even if they don’t have the same gaudy individual statistics. LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson was a third-team All-American and is massively popular thanks to her music career and being a member of the Tigers’ title team in 2023. She is charismatic and engaging, she flies up and down the basketball court, and her commercials are omnipresent. The limiting factor with Johnson is that the Tigers don’t often play games of consequence until SEC play, putting them out of the public eye. Kim Mulkey would have to break from precedent with her scheduling practices to make a bigger push for Johnson.
South Carolina’s MiLaysia Fulwiley is another player who captivates fans, but she has been far too inconsistent, especially during the tournament, to belong in this conversation.
It’s worth considering whether women’s basketball even needs a singular talismanic presence to lead the way. With women’s basketball continuing to experience growth, and programs without a track record of success establishing themselves, maybe the sport doesn’t have to center itself on one individual as much.
Then again, watching the momentum behind Clark or Bueckers in their final season, or even Watkins as she built off a historic freshman campaign, suggests the star-powered way works. Having one overarching story is an easy sell for fans, and if a team is good enough, it naturally intersects with most of the other best teams and players anyway. Focusing on the game’s great coaches and their rivalries with one another has also been a productive way of marketing the game.
The fact that there isn’t an obvious candidate at this point isn’t necessarily a problem — Clark didn’t become a national phenomenon until late in her junior year. But after a fairly uncompetitive NCAA Tournament, especially at the Final Four, it would help the sport to have a new centerpiece heading into 2025-26, something to propel the attention forward.
Even with the increasing pool of talent at the college level, there is no guarantee that any one person will break through. For the good of the game, the hope is that someone emerges. The test of Clark’s and Bueckers’ popularity will be if their legacy is a sport that continues to churn out stars.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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