Courtney Williams is showing the WNBA how to let loose

On August 23, 2018, Courtney Williams had the audacity to rankle the GOAT.

Before the Connecticut Sun played the Phoenix Mercury in the playoffs, the slim, 5’8 guard posted her traditional gameday Instagram photo. In it, she is jumping for joy while a stone-faced Diana Taurasi — arguably the greatest WNBA player of all time — stalks the court in the foreground. The caption read, “Gooo timeee!! Playoffs babyyyyy.”

Williams led the Sun with 27 points in the single-elimination game, and gave them the lead late in the fourth quarter with a four-point play. The Sun would only score four more points over the final four-plus minutes, however, as the Mercury went on to win, 96-86. After the game, Taurasi clapped back.

“You can post Instagram pictures, you can clap in people’s faces,” Taurasi told ESPN’s Holly Rowe in the postgame interview, also referring to a moment when the Sun’s Jasmine Thomas clapped in Taurasi’s face after drawing a foul. “That’s not going to get you a win, though.”

Throughout Williams’ three seasons in the WNBA, she’s managed to fly under the national radar. If you’ve missed her career thus far, maybe you even think that calling out the biggest name in the game was an attempt to draw attention. But you’d be wrong; Williams wasn’t trying to get under Taurasi’s skin (though perhaps she wasn’t not trying).

The way Williams sees it, posting the photo wasn’t a personal dig at Taurasi. It was a good photo, she says, and Taurasi just happened to be in it. It could have been any Phoenix player, really, she swears.

Or maybe it was personal, though not against Taurasi (or any other player). You see, Williams actually began her career in Phoenix, but was traded halfway through her rookie season. “It’s always a little chip on my shoulder every time we play Phoenix, I want to come out and show what I can do because clearly I wasn’t given an opportunity to do that over there,” Williams says.

Whatever it was, and whatever it appeared to be to fans who were watching, Williams’ firm stance is Taurasi’s response was “mad corny.”

“They was breathing hard!” she says. “You all” — referring to Phoenix — “barely won that game.” If she sounds like she’s talking trash, she definitely is. Running her mouth could have consequences for a young player like her, but Williams isn’t concerned.

She thinks beefing is good for the game, that it will bring attention and interest to a league which could use more of it. She wants to see more trash talking, and despite her characterization of Taurasi’s clapback, Williams respects the fact she went there. “A lot more people need to … open up their mouth and not be scared to speak up, because people like adversity, people like drama.”

She also sees a double standard in the way player beef is handled in the men’s game compared to the women’s, and she’d like to lead change by example. “Let any type of altercation happen in the NBA, it’s front row and center. But any altercation happen in the WNBA, it’s like, nobody better talk about that,” she says.

“We can’t talk about that because women aren’t supposed to act like that.”

Williams has never been one to pay attention to what other people think she’s supposed to do.

On the day I meet Williams, I watch her warm up at a practice during Sun training camp, where she moves at her own speed through drills and sprints, a little slower than some of her teammates. Williams looks a bit like Samira Wiley but with tattoos and a slightly butcher swag, and if Wiley had a buttery Georgia drawl and could sink threes from anywhere on the floor. She wears tennis ball-yellow sneakers on the court, but when I see her outside the locker room she has switched into a pair of khaki-colored Yeezy Boost 350s. She pairs them with black Adidas track pants, a Sun quarter-zip pullover, a camo hat cocked backwards and slightly sideways atop her tight cropped curls with bleached ends, and a fanny pack worn cross-body — strap in front, pouch in back.

There is an looseness about Williams. She says “fact” when you say something she agrees with or make a good point, which I like; it makes me feel like I’ve earned her approval.

Her frame makes her an unassuming presence on the basketball court, and she grew up in Folkston, Georgia, a town of less than 5,000 people located just over the Florida border, too far out of the way for many college recruiters. As a result, Williams was underestimated out of high school. She’s gotten used to that. No one has ever seen her coming.

“From a young age, Courtney said that this is what she was going to do [play in the WNBA],” says Michele Williams Daniels, Courtney’s mother, from Folkston. “And she did it, and … there was nobody to lead the way. There has never been nobody to come out of Folkston for basketball, [boys or girls], and she did it. To go play to a Division I school and definitely not to be drafted in no first round.”

Williams is hard to find even on her home court. Uncasville, Connecticut, is home to the Mohegan reservation and the Mohegan Sun Resort and Casino, an edifice of over-the-top maximalism doing its best Las Vegas impression that also houses the Sun. The entrance to the Mohegan Sun Arena is sandwiched between a Le Creuset store and blinking, chirping slot machines.

But once inside, Williams gets the loudest cheers. “She has an uncanny way of having people gravitate to her, from teammates to fans,” says Sun coach Curt Miller. “She’s our most popular player and she gets the [biggest] applause of anyone on our team.” When the crowd screams for her, she flashes a smile bright enough to be seen from the nosebleeds.

Williams’ game is predicated on catching people off guard. She’s quick and can create shots from anywhere on the floor. “Just the fact that she’s able to fill up a stat sheet with that small body is amazing, and it’s not just points. It’s rebounds, it’s steals, it’s assists,” says her teammate, veteran guard Jasmine Thomas. “You see that small frame and you just don’t realize how big she plays.”

She believes she can do anything on the court and she can, thanks in part to her vertical leap. “Yup, I got hops,” Williams laughs. Despite her small stature, she is unfazed by the height of centers — who often have almost a foot on her — because of her ability to get up and over them. It seems physically impossible that someone of her size should be able to jump as high as she does and yet, up she goes.

In that playoff loss to Phoenix, Miller says Williams “put us on her back for a lot of that game.”

“We didn’t get to the finish line, but she willed us at times to almost a really, really important victory over a team that has two of the best who have ever played this game in their positions,” he adds. “She went toe-to-toe with Taurasi and Griner.”

The late-to-the-party internet took notice of the performance, too. The Ringer’s Shea Serrano, who was rooting for the Mercury, tweeted, “WHO IS [COURTNEY] WILLIAMS AND WHY IS SHE RUINING MY LIFE.”

Williams’ social media feeds, especially her Instagram, are true to her. She doesn’t produce content that a more polished, branded public figure might. Instead, she presents a mix of outfits (“That’s what the people want … I’m easily best dressed in the WNBA.”), family, and basketball. She’s been told to watch what she posts, because as a professional athlete, she’s supposed to be a role model. A parent told Miller she won’t let her daughter follow Williams on Instagram because of the content. Miller says that becoming a pro “off the court” is the next step in Williams’ development as a player.

But Williams thinks that’s nonsense. She concedes that sometimes she posts stories of herself doing shots of alcohol. And she admits there are plenty of videos of girls twerking. And, oh yeah, there were all the strippers she liked to post when she first made it into the league (“I was living my best life!”). But, like Tupac, “I want to be a real model, not a role model,” she says. “I want people to love the real me. I like to turn up, I like to go to parties, I like to kick it with my nephew. I like different clothes. I love playing basketball.”

Part of being a “real model” is being openly and visibly queer, though she’s adamant that she doesn’t want to be “put in a box.”

Williams had a more traditionally feminine style when she was in college, which included long hair, and she wore a dress and heels to the draft. After the 2017 season, she did a big chop, taking out her weave and going natural. Her style — her “swag” — took on a more traditionally masculine presentation. Williams describes herself as dressing “like a little boy.” That presentation is important to her. At the same time, she also feels like people assume her orientation because of the way she presents.

“I still like dudes, but I got to wear a skirt because I like dudes?” she says, adding that she’s thinking about bringing back the long hair, just to throw everyone off their game.

“I like guys and I like girls, though these days I’ve been feeling more gay,” she says. “Whoever sweeps me off my feet is who I rock with.”

As a child, Courtney slept with a basketball and told her parents that she wanted to play in the WNBA one day. “She’s from a small town, but she thinks big,” Daniels says. Courtney’s hypercompetitive father Don modeled his parenting after Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena. His two daughters, Courtney and her older sister Doniece, never took to tennis, but Don adapted to their interests. Doniece preferred to play indoors, but Courtney wanted to play ball.

There was a hoop outside their home, and when Courtney was mad, she’d go outside and shoot. Together, she and Don took on the neighborhood, challenging everyone to play. Courtney inherited her dad’s competitive spirit — she wants to win whether she’s playing ball, checkers, or Monopoly — but more than that, she loves the game. “I enjoy myself every time I play basketball,” she says. “I would still be playing ball whether I was being paid for it or not.”

She learned just how much the sport meant to her when Don wouldn’t let her play her sophomore year at Charlton County High School. She was sneaking out of windows late at night to meet up with a local boy who Don thought was trouble. Don was adamant that nothing ruin Williams’ chance at a future in basketball.

“I was so mad at him,” Williams says. Though her mom lessened the sting by letting her continue to play AAU ball, Don says he’d do it all over again.

Williams came back to the team her junior year and scored 42 points in a game, breaking the single-game record that stood for 22 years — a record that had been held by her mother. She quickly broke the record again, scoring 44. She would go on to score more than 27 points a game her senior season, and yet Williams was never a top-100 recruit in high school.

“I remember when she was a senior in high school, she took her little school who never wins anything to the state semifinals,” says Kenny Kallina, who coached Williams on the Florida Girls Basketball travel team. She dropped 47 points in the quarterfinals and was named first-team all-state, and yet she was left out of the senior all-star game for the state of Georgia. Kallina says he “raised a bunch of hell” about her omission but still couldn’t get her in the game. She went to elite camps at Georgia Tech and Auburn, and was MVP of both, yet neither school offered her because, Kallina says, they were too busy chasing players with more hype. “I was convinced that she was going to be really good the second I saw her,” Kallina says. “I don’t know why I was the only person who really thought that.”

Only one school made the trip to Folkston and saw her for who she was. Her drive and determination impressed University of South Florida coach Jose Fernandez. “I always thought Courtney’s best basketball was ahead of her,” he says. Williams committed to USF because of the fact the school worked so hard to woo her when no one else would. “That dude,” Don says of Fernandez, “he had to have [felt like he] found the pot of gold.”

In college, she introduced herself in person to fans in Connecticut who would soon be cheering for her on the Sun. Playing for USF, she was in the AAC Conference with UConn, and torched one the most dominant basketball dynasties of all time. Only Notre Dame’s Skylar Diggins and Louisville’s Angel McCoughtry, both legends, recorded as many 20-point games against the Huskies in their careers. Williams also helped propel USF to just their second NCAA tournament appearance during her freshman year, then took the Bulls back to the tournament as a junior and senior.

“She was able to catch and shoot quickly, she was able to catch and go by you,” says Geno Auriemma, head coach of UConn women’s basketball. “She could hit pull-ups, she could hit threes, go right or go left. She was just a really difficult match up for anybody and I don’t think there’s anybody in college who really had an answer for her on a regular basis.”

Williams was rewarded for her collegiate success by being drafted eighth overall by the Phoenix Mercury, making her the highest draft pick in USF’s program history, and it seemed like she might finally receive her long overdue recognition. But after appearing in only six games with the Mercury, in which she averaged just over four minutes of play and less than one point per game, Phoenix was ready to let her go.

While walking through Times Square with two friends who had come to New York to see her play, Williams got a call from Mercury coach Sandy Brondello with the “good news” that she had been traded to Connecticut. “I didn’t know how I felt. I think my heart dropped but it dropped more of excitement,” Williams says. “I was soaking in as much as I could from all the great players over there [in Phoenix] but at the end of the day, we all want to play basketball. No one want to ride no bench so, you know, I felt like I get to start all over again.”

Phoenix lost sight of her potential. Luckily, someone else didn’t. Williams made such an impression on Auriemma in college that he lobbied the Sun behind the scenes to take a chance on her. He felt that perhaps the Mercury drafted Williams thinking that she was a point guard. Auriemma saw her as someone who simply went out and got points. “I said, [to Miller], ‘If that’s what you need her for, to go get the ball and go score, then she’s going to do that. There’s nobody that I know that can stop her from doing that.’”

What Williams did to UConn, she now does to the Sun’s opponents. Her history in Connecticut made her an instant hit at Mohegan Sun Arena, and she met that excitement. The Sun were 3-12 when they traded for her at the end of June 2016, and they finished that season by going 11-8. She gave the Sun 8.1 points per game as an off-the-bench, microwave scorer, and buoyed a struggling team with her energy.

In 2017, Williams stepped into the starting role when then-teammate Alex Bentley went to represent Belarus in the Euro Championships. But just a year into her time on the Sun, her place in the WNBA was challenged yet again.

Bentley was traded to the Atlanta Dream in the midst of the 2018 season among vague and cryptic headlines about an “altercation” with Williams. The incident kept Williams away from the team and off the court for four games. Whether that time away was a personal or team decision is unclear. Williams wants to talk about what happened, but the team asked her not to (“See what I’m trying to tell you?” she shakes her head. “They keep everything on the hush.”) Sun vice president Amber Cox will only say “sometimes for team chemistry reasons, you have to make a change.”

The fact the Sun stuck with Williams after the Bentley incident is a testament to not only her skill, but her personality. Sports teams and leagues generally don’t like iconoclasts. Life is usually easier as a player who performs well on the court but doesn’t make waves off of it. But to Williams’ benefit, the Sun have let her shine exactly as she is.

For example, the Sun filmed a series videos for game breaks during the upcoming season that feature Williams teaching Coach Miller the meanings of some of her colloquialisms. In one, she explains him what it means to be “snatched.” It means “to look good,” just like Williams knows she always does. They’ve even begun selling t-shirts with her face on them.

The Sun may occasionally suggest that she clean up her social media accounts — but it’s just a suggestion.

“If she’s not [an integral part to this team], then we’re not as good as we could be,” says Miller. “I just think she has the ability to be a leading scorer on our team, a leader on and off the court.”

If anything, Williams has been a unifier for the Sun. “I’m really glad you’re writing this,” Thomas tells me. “She was in the headlines for other reasons last year” — the Bentley situation — “and I don’t want people to think that’s who she is.”

The decision to trade Bentley and keep Williams was “absolutely” a “commitment to Courtney as part of this franchise,” says Cox. “I think our commitment to this group” — Williams, Morgan Tuck, Rachel Banham, Jonquel Jones — “is giving them the opportunity to take this next step together and Courtney is obviously a big part of that.” Courtney admits that being forced away from her team during the season was tough.

“When anything happens on the team that causes some sort of controversy, you know, it can kind of be a disconnect with the team,” she says. “When I came back I tried to just do what I do and keep good energy.”

And her teammates clearly value her presence. “I feel better when she’s on the court with me,” says Thomas. Miller calls her the team’s “energy,” though he laughs and says that asking what she brings to the team is “a loaded question.” But he says that people love to play with her and that she’s never in a bad mood. Tuck says the same thing: she’s never seen Williams show up to practice down or upset. She lifts everyone else up when she walks into a room.

Her father calls Williams “my secret weapon.” The Sun say she is theirs, too. And even for all of her confidence and swagger, there’s humility at the core of Williams. When she finds out that this story is not an assignment I’ve been given, but one I had been planning since the end of last season, she’s a bit incredulous.

“Why you wanna talk to me?” she asks.

Why wouldn’t I want to talk to her? I first saw Williams play in person in July last season against the New York Liberty, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She seemed to be everywhere all at once, the ball perpetually sailing from her hands into the basket. Her game seemed implausible; someone so small shouldn’t be physically able to take up so much space. She radiated joy. She scored 16 points but it felt like 30. I did not know at the time that it was her first game back following the Bentley incident.

It was a game where Williams again had something to prove, like she’s had so many other times throughout her career. She wanted to show the team that stood by her that they made the right choice.

In turn, she wants to see all levels of the game encourage players to be themselves, to find the support she’s found in Connecticut.

“You need to fit a certain type of image when you’re in college,” she says, referring to the pressure to conform to more traditionally feminine ideals. “Your coaches and stuff tell you that, too … At the end of the day, though, you’ve got to let these girls do them.”

Williams’ favorite restaurant is Arooga’s, a Friday’s-esque establishment just outside of the Mohegan Sun Casino, though she admits her options are limited in Uncasville. It’s where she comes after every game. We go for lunch following practice, and she stops to greet a fan who recognizes her. Williams is working through her food — buffalo wings (all flats, medium sauce), fries, and a mango Arooga-rita with sugar on the rim — when she turns around to the two men sitting in the booth behind us.

“Can you name any WNBA teams?” she asks them. They do not seem to know who she is.

Both shake their heads, no.

“What about NBA? Can you name three NBA teams?”

The men, who admit they don’t watch basketball at all, can.

“See?” She turns back around to face me. “That’s what I mean.”

If it were up to Williams, the WNBA would lower the rim so that players could dunk. It’s a controversial take, one that a lot of players vehemently disagree with. But Williams thinks that allowing the athletes to play above the rim would go a long way towards increasing interest in the league. She points out that if you ask a member of the general public to name a WNBA player, they might name Lisa Leslie.

“How long ago that was and that’s the only WNBA player you can name is Lisa Leslie? And it’s because why? It’s because she was the first woman to dunk a basketball. That’s why you know Lisa Leslie.” Same goes for her Sun teammate, Jonquel Jones, who dunked in the 2017 WNBA All-Star Game and then was the SportsCenter No. 1 highlight all week.

She points out that many other sports make concessions for the differences in men’s and women’s bodies: the net in volleyball is lower, and even the ball is smaller in the WNBA. “It’s like, we want that [the rim height] to be equal, but why?” While the centers, who are much taller than the average player, may be able to dunk, the truth is that the majority of the league’s players will never be able to do it.

She often punctuates her more controversial opinions with the acknowledgment that “the vets” — an unnamed group of league veterans — wouldn’t like to hear her say these things. She doesn’t care. While many in the league might disagree, who better to forge an unconventional path forward than a player who has spent most of her life being overlooked?

Williams, by the sheer force of her personality and talent, is on a trajectory to stardom. She has weathered everything that might have knocked her off course, and never once had to sacrifice who she is in the process.

She has every reason to be confident, and her time with the Sun has proven being bold can be infectious. If Williams does one day remodel the WNBA, it could only be exactly in her image: brash, fun, and inclusive. Williams would be the vanguard to a league unafraid to celebrate no matter who wanders into the picture.