Sophie Cunningham is back in the headlines for a reason that has nothing to do with basketball. The Indiana Fever guard responded on X, formerly Twitter, to a video of her baptism from the weekend before and wrote, “Loving Jesus is fun, try it [brown heart emoji].”
On TikTok, Cunningham said she had already been baptized as a young child, but said she was “feeling a tug on my heart to do it on my terms as an adult.” The baptism was part of recommitting to her faith, and it landed just days after she re-signed with the Fever on Sunday, Apr. 12, 2026, on a one-year deal for the 2026 WNBA season.
The timing matters because Cunningham had become an unrestricted free agent for the first time heading into the 2026 season, and her return keeps her in Indiana after one of the most disrupted stretches of her career. She spent the 2025 season with the Fever, playing in 30 games and starting 13 before averaging 8.6 points, 3.5 rebounds and 1.2 assists per game.
That season ended early when she suffered a torn MCL in the Fever’s game against the Connecticut Sun on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025, and she did not return for the rest of the year. Before that injury, Cunningham had given Indiana a dependable veteran presence after arriving from the Phoenix Mercury, where she spent the first six seasons of her WNBA career.
She was drafted by Phoenix in the second round of the 2019 WNBA Draft out of Missouri, where she had already built a decorated college résumé. Cunningham won SEC Freshman of the Year and made the SEC All-Freshman Team in 2016, then was named First-team All-SEC every year from 2017 to 2019.
The only friction in the story is how public the moment became. Cunningham framed the baptism as a personal decision, but once the video spread online, it turned into a wider conversation about faith, identity and what it means to choose the same rite twice. Her own words leave little room for mystery: this was not a fresh conversion, but a deliberate adult recommitment to something she said had been tugging at her for some time.
What comes next is simpler. Cunningham is under contract for the 2026 season, and her public embrace of her faith now sits alongside the basketball comeback she is trying to build in Indiana.
