What you need to know about the StudBudz, Minnesota’s breakout celebrities

At the Lynx final home game of the season tonight, the top-seeded WNBA team will be giving away pink wigs.

If you’re extremely offline and missed the hype around the StudBudz — arguably Minnesota’s biggest celebrities right now — we’ll get you up to speed on the bestie teammates known for their charismatic, all-access livestreams and matching pink crops.

Lynx guards Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman, who met in 2019 when they both played for the Connecticut Sun. After a few years on different teams, Williams and Hiedeman were reunited by the Lynx in 2024.

In June, the duo started livestreaming their lives on Twitch as the StudBudz, a name that reflects their identities as masculine-presenting Black gay women who are bffs. They filmed themselves chatting at home, getting their hair done and even winning giant stuffies at 6 Flags’ midway.

When Williams played in the WNBA All Star Game in July, the duo filmed the long weekend for 72 hours straight. Candid cameos with star players included Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers and Caitlin Clark, who said she’d watched hours of the stream. The duo even got WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert to get down with them on the dance floor. (Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who was also filmed partying with the StudBudz, later joked that video of her was “AI.”)

Arguably, yes. They were just featured in the pages of Vogue, on the cover of Slam and threw the first pitches at a Minnesota Twins game. They have 80,000 followers on Twitch, 120,000 on Instagram, their own merch line and sponsorships with Starbucks, DoorDash, Sprite among other major companies.

The StudBudz All Star stream countered negative misperceptions that WNBA players are bitter rivals and showed there’s a lot of camaraderie among the fierce competitors. Also, the besties’ openness about their lives — the StudBudz are unapologetically themselves, talking about everything from their ideal partners to their periods — is a stark contrast from most pro athletes’ tendency to guard their privacy.

Matt Reed, StudBudz main Twitch moderator, known as PortsideDive, says that in addition to the highlights from All Star Weekend (“I think I slept a total of 11 hours total over the three days,” he recalled), some of his favorite stream moments have been the times they reached subscriber goals and celebrated by Williams dying her hair pink to match Hiedeman’s and Heideman jumping into a swimming pool with her clothes on. Since those streams aren’t online anymore, his more recent recommendation is to watch Hiedeman walk a cow at the Minnesota State Fair.

They just did a promotion with Kotex feminine hygiene products and dyed their hair “period red.” Troy Dahlstrom, a longtime fan and organizer of Lynx lovers, recommends that latest stream for breaking the stigma around menstruation. Another video Dahlstrom recommends is the StudBudz taking fans along on their epic double-date to Topgolf.