Tara Starks, the women’s basketball coach at Hopkins, who has known Bueckers since she was in fourth grade, credited her success to staying consistent on and off the court.
“You always know what you’re going to get with her,” Starks said. “She’s been exactly the same since she was a kid. She’s always been extremely loyal and protective of the people she’s closest to.”
Bueckers seized on the N.C.A.A.’s new name, image and likeness rules and became the first college athlete to be signed by Gatorade, among other lucrative deals. She has also used her reach to shine a spotlight on issues close to her, including gender and racial equity. Bueckers’s nine-year-old brother, Drew, has a Black mother and a white father, and in the wake of police killings of Black men and women in the summer of 2020, Bueckers used Instagram to call for change.
“At what point do they stop looking at my little brother as a cute little boy and instead as a threat to society?” she wrote. “It scares me. I’m going to work for change little brother. I want you to grow up in a world that accepts you for who you are.”
At the 2021 ESPY Awards, Bueckers used a speech to spotlight the Black women in her life and to call for better representation in basketball. Starks said she knew “a small bit of that was meant for me.”
She added: “When she sees that sort of thing and is in a position to speak up, she does.”
Bueckers is confident in everything she does, Starks said, for better or worse.