Paige Bueckers Chosen First General by Dallas Wings Throughout 2025 WNBA Draft

Paige Bueckers is able to be an enormous star within the Lone Star State!

Throughout the 2025 WNBA Draft on Monday, April 14 in New York Metropolis, the Dallas Wings chosen Bueckers, 23, with the primary choose.

The UConn Huskies star, who, alongside Azzi Fudd, led her crew to the 2025 NCAA ladies’s championship over Daybreak Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks on April 7, wore a black swimsuit for her massive evening.

As soon as her title was chosen, she hugged her teammate Azzi Fudd and UConn head coach Geno Auriemma, in addition to her mother and father.

Bueckers, who shed tears on ESPN after she was chosen, mentioned that she felt “an overwhleming sense of gratitude” and credit score her family and friends for his or her assist. “It takes a village,” Bueckers added.

“It is tremendous surreal simply being right here with different draft invitees,” Bueckers informed ESPN’s Holly Rowe. “I have been specializing in staying current, staying the place my ft are and to be right here proper now, I am extraordinarily blessed.”

Bueckers, who follows within the footsteps of final 12 months’s No. 1 choose Caitlin Clark, was joined by her household: mother and father Bob Bueckers and Amy Fuller, and youthful siblings Drew, Ryan and Lauren.

Throughout an interview with PEOPLE simply earlier than the March Insanity event kicked off, Bueckers shared that she loves how “disconnected” from basketball her siblings are. “They do not actually speak basketball with me. They only are my little siblings. They only deliver me an entire bunch of pleasure. They’ve this little child pleasure about them.”

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Bueckers additionally spoke to PEOPLE about how she’s navigating the top of her faculty profession and transition into the WNBA. “It is like you understand the top is close to, so that you’re attempting to cherish it and drag it out so long as attainable as a result of you do not need it to finish,” Bueckers mentioned earlier than the event.

She shared on the time that she wished to play “with ardour and pleasure” within the last faculty contest that she and UConn went on to win.