I started asking NBA WAGs questions. Now, millions are watching.

Yahoo

2 days ago

Maddy Sells on "WAG Talk" — and getting the scoop on Paige Bueckers's girlfriend.
'How well do you know your NBA husband?' It's a question you may have heard as you scroll through social media, and it's one Maddy Sells is directing at the wives (and girlfriends, aka WAGs) of NBA players as they hang out courtside or loiter near the locker room. Sells — the woman behind the video series WAG Talk — will quiz each WAG about their partner's playing history before revealing who they're coupled up with.
In the case of WNBA No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers, who got the WAG Talk treatment during WNBA All-Star Weekend last week, the answer is her former UConn teammate Azzi Fudd. Bueckers's interview with Sells hard launched the two players' relationship for the first time, nearly breaking the internet in the process.
For Sells, who grew up playing basketball and idolizing teams like the Miami Heat, putting WAGs — a group of women so often subjected to stereotypes — in the spotlight is a response to something she noticed early on through her own fandom: It was men who dominated the conversation, while their partners sat on the sidelines. With WAG Talk, the sports marketing major is handing WAGs the mic and racking up millions of clicks in the process. And with her recent expansion to include not just the NBA but the WNBA and their other halves (like Bueckers and Fudd) too, she's also giving queer relationships their due.
In this interview with Yahoo's Kerry Justich, Sells shares in her own words how she's created a brand out of platforming wives and girlfriends — and what it means for the future of sports coverage.
I started WAG Talk in February at the Miami Heat Gala. I would see these couples walking the red carpet, and the media would interview all the players while the wives and girlfriends would stand to the side and listen. There were a lot of really cool women who were not getting interviewed at all, which I felt was such a missed opportunity. Jaime Jaquez Jr.'s girlfriend is Dominique Ruotolo, a Division I track runner, and Kevin Love's wife [Kate Love] is a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model. There are just so many cool stories to be told about these women, and they didn't really have the platform. So I thought that would be the perfect place to launch the start of WAG Talk.
I got about five interviews there, the biggest one being Tyler Herro's girlfriend [Katya Elise Henry]. That video got 31 million views on TikTok. So I was like, OK, people really do have an appetite for this content.
A different point of entry for sports fans
When I started working with [the media company] Enjoy Basketball, I came in knowing that it was a super, super positive brand. Everything that they do is just to uplift athletes and to be very positive about growing the game. So I wanted to make this series really, really positive and something that I know the women will have fun playing along with.
I feel like my audience has been changing with every single video that I post. It's finally become a 50-50 split of men and women following WAG Talk, which is really nice. I think people watch it for different reasons.
There's an audience of women who are really interested in fashion and just everything with the WAG-related lifestyle. There are also plenty of women who love sports and want to follow along to see if they can get the questions right about the athlete. The same goes for the male audience. A lot of guys tell me that WAG Talk is their guilty pleasure because they like to see if they can figure out who the player is before the reveal. That's how I wanted to get viewers engaged in this series.
There's been a ton of negativity on the content in the past from people who think really negatively about wives and girlfriends of players. But there was kind of a big switch [during WNBA All-Star Weekend], with so much positivity from WNBA fans. I gained a whole new audience.
Paige Bueckers's hard launch
She was definitely at the very top of my list. I went into the weekend preparing a bunch of different WAG Talk questions for tons of different people, and I was able to get Paige and Natasha [Cloud, of the New York Liberty] on the orange carpet. I honestly wasn't expecting them to say yes to the interview. I never want to make anyone uncomfortable talking about a relationship that they're not ready to talk about. But when I noticed that Paige was really comfortable with it, I was like, 'OK, let's do this.' She was so happy when I said, 'How well do you know your D1 girlfriend?' Her smile just made my day.
Other content creators in sports, like Aliyah Funschelle, were around me too. She had interviewed Paige right before I did, so after my interview happened, she looked at me and said, 'Maddy, I think that was the hard launch. You need to go.' I was like, 'Oh, I gotta sprint to my hotel to edit this because this is going to go absolutely crazy.'
The response to it has been amazing. The Paige video has 11 million views, and the one with Natasha Cloud [speaking about her girlfriend and Liberty teammate Isabelle Harrison] has 7 million. So there clearly is a big appetite for knowing about these relationships and women's sports in general. These videos have a lot more views than a lot of NBA videos.
The importance of WNBA coverage
Pride Month is when I first did a WNBA WAG Talk, and it was with [New York Liberty star] Breanna Stewart's wife. And that was very intentional. The WNBA content has really hit the queer community, which is super cool. They just like seeing the LGBTQ community being promoted in sports, finally.
I still do want to include the HABs [husbands and boyfriends of women athletes]. As such a big Heat fan, [Miami player] Bam Adebayo and [Las Vegas Aces center] A'ja Wilson are my favorite couple ever, and I've been wanting to do a video with them. But seeing how excited and happy the women are while talking about their [female] partners has shown the world so much positivity when it comes to the queer community.
Over the weekend, we went from 48,000 [followers] on TikTok to 73,000. Seeing how powerful the female audience is and just how much they love this switch of WAG Talk going into the WNBA has been really, really cool to see. It just proved how big an appetite there is for women's sports. When you make the content, the audience will come. There are plenty of WNBA fans out there. There needs to be more content being created around it, because these women deserve huge platforms. They deserve to be able to tell their stories.
This has been edited for length and clarity.
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