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It was one dreaded moment after another for the WNBA.
Months of conflict came to a breaking point Saturday when DiJonai Carrington struck Sophie Cunningham in the face. A scuffle ensued, Carrington was ejected and then came the social media post that lit the internet on fire.
“White privilege.”
And just like that, the WNBA discourse was about race again. Not just sex, as it had been for weeks.
The hit was a product of two different players from two different worlds, but with novel similarities.
Cunningham and Carrington both played football, but in very different settings
The WNBA’s infamous hit just so happened to involve two former football players that played against boys.
Carrington played two years of flag football and then two years of tackle during her elementary school years. She wanted to play because her brother and sister played it too.
Growing up in San Diego, Carrington’s father Darren Carrington played for five different NFL teams, but they called San Diego home.
Her father’s career earnings are not known, but based on the averages of NFL salaries at the time, he likely made multiple millions of dollars across his eight-year career. DiJonai attended the private Horizon Christian Academy, where her mother was her basketball coach coach.
On the first day of 2015, DiJonai penned an essay that was published in ESPN.com about flying out to California to watch her brother, Darren Jr., play in the Rose Bowl.
Meanwhile, Cunningham went to public high school in Columbia, Missouri. But she attended a private Catholic school during her younger years.
Cunningham played football at Rock Bridge High School with grown boys, but didn’t do any tackling like Carrington did in elementary school.
Cunningham was a placekicker, and was protected from any plays that involved tackling, but she still made school history as the first girl to score varsity points.
She grew up on a 2,500 acre farm, and once suggested she came from a “blue-collar” background.
“I would never speak down upon middle class, blue-collar working people. That’s where I come from,” Cunningham said last July, in an apology for criticizing the selection of Cleveland as a WNBA expansion city.
Her maternal family operated a large farm while her father worked as a building contractor, but things changed for the Cunningham family in 2008.
Cunningham revealed in a July interview on the “Sons and Daughters” podcast, that the 2008 financial crisis impacted her family.
“We were raised in a really good family who gave us more than what we could think of. But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have hard times. Our dad was a contractor in the 2008 Economic [crisis], all that stuff that hit our family very hard. And when I say very hard, very very hard,” she said.
“And so people look at me and it’s really easy to be like ‘Oh, she had everything’ or ‘She did whatever.’ It’s like, no, we went through some hard times as a family. But honestly, looking back, those were our most fun times. Like we were in a smaller house. We were together 24/7. There were no extra rooms to go to. Some people could be embarrassed by that, but I take great pride like ‘Hey, our family isn’t built on fluff and all the shiny and crazy things. We have a real family that when hard times hit, they’re going to show you even more love than you knew existed.”
Cunningham stayed close to home for college, Carrington went on a journey
Both were nationally ranked recruits. Both became McDonald’s All-Americans. Both played AAU basketball, which put them in front of college coaches beyond their hometowns.
But Cunningham’s recruitment was practically over before she entered high school.
After eighth grade, Cunningham joined the Missouri Eclipse on the AAU circuit. Missouri coach Robin Pingeton began recruiting both Sophie and her older sister Lindsey, eventually offering each a full scholarship.
The sisters committed to Missouri, even as Cunningham’s reputation grew and other coaches continued calling.
The decision kept her close to home, but it also continued a family tradition. Her mother, father, aunt, uncle and grandfather had all competed for Missouri.
And Sophie immediately became the face of the program.
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In her fourth college game, she scored a school-record 42 points against Wake Forest. She was named SEC Freshman of the Year and helped Missouri reach the NCAA Tournament for the first time in a decade.
The Tigers made the tournament in all four of her seasons.
By the end of her career, Cunningham was a three-time First-Team All-SEC selection and a Third-Team All-American. She finished as Missouri’s all-time leading scorer with 2,187 points and also set the school record for free throws made.
Carrington took a longer winding road through college.
Two ACL surgeries limited her to two and a half seasons of high school basketball. But she still scored more than 2,000 points, played for Cal Sparks Gold on the club circuit and became a five-star recruit.
She first committed to Stanford, the famed elite university on the West Coast.
Carrington came off the bench as a freshman for a team that reached the Final Four and won the Pac-12 Tournament. Two years later, she became a full-time starter and averaged 14 points and 7.5 rebounds.
She was named All-Pac-12 and helped Stanford win another conference tournament title before reaching the Elite Eight.
Then her knee interrupted her career again.
Carrington played just five games during her senior season before another injury forced her out. She still graduated from Stanford with two undergraduate degrees, one in psychology and another in African and African American studies.
She also received a medical hardship waiver, giving her another year of eligibility.
So while Cunningham spent her entire college career in the city where she was raised, Carrington entered the transfer portal and started another recruiting process during the COVID-19 shutdown.
Carrington ended up going to Baylor, and started only one game there. But she became the team’s second-leading scorer with 14.1 points per game. She was named both the Big 12 Newcomer of the Year and Sixth Player of the Year.
Baylor won the Big 12 regular-season and tournament championships before losing to UConn by two points in the Elite Eight.
Cunningham and Carrington have since become symbols for two different sides of the WNBA
Both players entered the WNBA as second-round picks.
Cunningham went 13th overall (first pick of the second round) to the Phoenix Mercury in 2019. Carrington went 20th (eighth pick of the second round) to the Connecticut Sun two years later in 2021.
Cunningham spent six seasons in Phoenix, where she developed the “Spicy Sophie” nickname and a reputation for playing with emotion. She was a shooter, an agitator and a willing participant in almost any confrontation.
Carrington spent four seasons in Connecticut and built a similar reputation from the defensive side of the ball.
She went from a reserve to one of the league’s most disruptive perimeter defenders. In 2024, Carrington was named the WNBA’s Most Improved Player and made the All-Defensive First Team.
But their reputations eventually became bigger than their performances.
Cunningham was traded to Indiana before the 2025 season, placing her alongside Caitlin Clark and in front of the largest audience in the league.
Her popularity exploded in June when she committed a hard foul on Connecticut’s Jacy Sheldon after Sheldon made contact with Clark’s eye. Cunningham was ejected, but many Fever fans celebrated the foul as an act of protection.
Then came Cunningham’s label: “The Enforcer.”
Cunningham leaned into her bold personality through fashion, social media and a podcast she launched with longtime friend and reality television personality West Wilson.
Her romantic life, however, has remained mostly private.
Cunningham has not publicly identified a current partner. On her podcast, she said she has only dated older men and discussed wanting to eventually get married and have children.
“I want to get married and I want to have a family,” Cunningham said in October.
Carrington’s relationship was much more public.
She began dating NaLyssa Smith after the two played together at Baylor. Their on-and-off relationship continued after both entered the WNBA, with fans following the couple through social media posts, vacations and courtside appearances.
Carrington resisted putting a label on her sexuality.
“I’m not gay, I just like Lyss,” she said in 2025.
Their careers brought them together again in Dallas in 2025, when Carrington was traded to the Wings and Smith arrived from Indiana.
It lasted only a few months.
Dallas traded Smith to Las Vegas in June, leaving Smith “sick to my stomach” about being unexpectedly separated from Carrington, according to a social media post she made after the deal.
Carrington was later traded to Minnesota in August 2025. But by November, the relationship was over.
Carrington initially said the two remained on good terms but had grown in different directions. Then, in July 2026, she publicly accused Smith of cheating on her with other WNBA players.
Smith questioned why Carrington brought the allegations forward after their breakup and disputed Carrington’s portrayal of the surrounding events, but did not directly confirm or deny the accusation.
One of the WNBA’s most visible romances had become part of the league’s public drama.
The two players also became political symbols.
Carrington has repeatedly spoken about racial justice, gender equality and the treatment of Black women. She has connected that advocacy to the African and African American studies education she received at Stanford.
“I’ll never back down from a conversation or from standing up for what I know is right,” Carrington said in 2025.
That outspokenness made her popular with some WNBA fans and a villain to others.
During the 2024 playoffs, Carrington accidentally struck Clark near the eye while attempting to block a pass. Clark said she did not believe it was intentional, but Carrington still received racist messages, sexual threats and death threats.
Cunningham became a political figure from the opposite direction.
In 2026, she voiced support for excluding transgender girls and women from female sports. The comments attracted praise from conservative figures and protests outside Fever games.
Cunningham said she would not hide her beliefs simply because others disagreed.
The controversy transformed her from a popular role player into one of the most polarizing athletes in the league.
Meanwhile, Carrington signed with Chicago while recovering from her foot injury. She returned to the court in late July 2026 after missing the first half of the season.
Cunningham returned to Indiana after recovering from the knee injury that ended her 2025 season.
By the time the two collided on Aug. 8, neither was viewed as just another WNBA player.
Cunningham was the white, heterosexual, Christian enforcer who had become a conservative symbol.
Carrington was the Black activist and former half of one of the league’s most visible same-sex relationships.
So when Carrington hit Cunningham, the public did not see only a foul.
It saw everything the two women had come to represent.
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And when Carrington made her “White privilege” post, it cemented the whole thing as a potential defining moment in WNBA history, or at least this current volatile chapter.
Carrington later insisted her post was not about the officials’ decision. “I never once claimed that the assessment of the foul was white privilege,” she wrote Monday. She said “I would never use that term as a rhetorical weapon knowing the historical and social weight it holds without having the proper evidence to substantiate it.”
Still, she’s remained vague about what she meant.
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