WNBA 2025 No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers said she wasn’t prepared for the rapid financial success she had in college. Following a landmark 2021 Supreme Court decision that paved the way for student-athletes to benefit from name, image, and likeness deals, Bueckers went from borrowing her mom’s credit card for food, clothes, and gas to having an estimated net worth of $1.5 million.

As a freshman at the University of Connecticut, Paige Bueckers blew through her college stipend so fast that she turned to her mother for financial support.

Spending all her money on clothes and food, she had to borrow her mom’s credit card to buy gas and other necessities.

“So she wasn’t really happy about that,” Bueckers, now a WNBA star, told Fortune . “Then [name, image, and likeness] came into place,

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