Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham is setting the record straight about her rebranded podcast and the speculation that it was related to a falling out with former cohost West Wilson.
“It’s just dumb. It’s just dumb,” Cunningham, 30, said during a Friday, September 11, appearance on “The Colin Cowherd Podcast.” “And I think before you have this platform and before you’re kind of in the spotlight, maybe I would have believed some of those stories or would have got caught up in the gossip.”
Cunningham added that she and Wilson, 31, never actually had a falling out — though she got a kick out of the speculation.
“I loved West. I think we had a really fun time together,” she said. “I know that he’s off doing great things, too. But he was going through some stuff, then I was going through some stuff.”
She continued, “So, I think a lot of people thought that we were going at it. We really weren’t. We were just rebranding. He was going to do his own thing. The Volume was going to take care of him. I wanted to go more basketball. And so, when I first saw it, I was like, ‘This is so goofy.’ And, like, we sent stuff back and forth. Me and West were like, ‘These people are just dumb.’ So it was fun. I still love West to death, and I had a great time with him.”
Cunningham and Wilson hosted the “Show Me Something” podcast, which had not released a new episode since June. In July, the Fever veteran voiced her opinion against trans women playing in the WNBA in an interview with ESPN. Days later, Wilson posted a TikTok video calling the controversy “a borderline non-existent issue.”
Cunningham’s podcast, which returned on Thursday, September 10 alongside her new cohost and shooting coach Drew Hanlen, has been renamed “No Hesitation.”
“Drew and I love this sport, we could talk basketball all day. Now we will!” Cunningham said in a statement announcing the rebrand. “We’ll dive into everything around the WNBA and NBA and can’t wait to share our thoughts. The Volume has been an awesome partner in making that happen.”
The move has actually been in the works “for months,” a source told Front Office Sports. The outlet reported that Cunningham and media company The Volume had been working under an expiring one-year deal and that Volume officials wanted the new show to focus solely on basketball.
Cunningham, who has a long history of controversial comments, told ESPN in July, “I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans [people]. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’ I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think, with that, love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
Wilson, however, said in his video, “Right-wingers have convinced a massive portion of people in our country that these people are, like, a threat to sports in America, when mathematically it’s not the case at all. And by continuing to platform this — politicians, athletes, journalists, news outlets — you’re only isolating transgender people even more by making them seem like this giant group of people is a threat to society, a threat to sports, when that’s just not proportionately the truth in any capacity.”
