Sophie Cunningham has been fielding criticism since ESPN published her July interview in which she spoke against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. The controversy became so consuming that Cunningham eventually called for an end to the noise and said it was time to get back to basketball. But the criticism has not disappeared. TYT Sports’ Rick Strom is now taking issue not with Cunningham’s stance itself, but with what he sees as inconsistencies in the messages she has sent throughout the controversy.

“Not long ago she gave an interview to the media pregame on the court saying, ‘I don’t know how we got here. We should just get back to basketball, there are so many great women in this league and we should only be talking about basketball,'” Strom said on Saturday’s episode of the Awful Announcing podcast. “And then they’re putting out this promo with Drew Hanlen where she’s saying, we should be telling stories on the court and off the court. And we should be talking about how the players are great within their skill set, but also who they are as a person.”

“So my head is spinning because all I’m thinking is, you don’t have any consistency whatsoever. And maybe she’s figuring it out right now. I’m not totally sure. But what I do know is all I see are contradictions within one person,” he added.

To a large extent, it is understandable how Strom arrived at that conclusion. Sophie Cunningham was the one who ignited the transgender debate in the first place, publicly opposing the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports and doubling down emphatically when challenged on her position. She made herself the central figure in one of the most heated off-court controversies the WNBA has seen in years.

And then, as the debate intensified across the summer, with protests, counter-protests, and wall-to-wall media coverage surrounding her wherever the Fever played, she came out in August to lament that WNBA media “covers everything except basketball” and urged everyone to “keep the main thing the main thing.” To an extent, this seemed like a contradiction, considering that her own comments had become a major catalyst for off-court conversations surrounding the league.

Then, following the intense controversy and her split from former podcast co-host West Wilson, Sophie Cunningham launched a rebranded podcast called No Hesitation alongside renowned NBA skills trainer Drew Hanlen. And the central message of the show’s promotional push is precisely about changing how the media covers and discusses players, emphasising full storytelling, celebrating skill sets on the court, and exploring who athletes truly are as people off it.

Because her season was so thoroughly hijacked by political headlines, Sophie Cunningham has explicitly stated that she wants the platform to focus on pure basketball mechanics, film breakdown, and the authentic human side of athletes, an approach designed to push the coverage of women’s basketball beyond controversy and toward substance.

According to Rick Strom, the fact that Sophie Cunningham is now also championing conversations about players both on and off the court through the new podcast appears contradictory to the statement she made in August, when she called for the media to stop focusing on everything except basketball. From Strom’s perspective, there’s a contrast between those two messages that is difficult to reconcile.

Perhaps Sophie Cunningham, when she made those August comments, was specifically referring to the politically charged off-court conversations rather than the broader human interest stories she now says she wants to tell. And maybe she wasn’t referring to controversial off-court issues in the recent promotional push for her new podcast. Perhaps the nuance around these statements matters. 

However, whatever the case may be, all of that does not matter from Rick Strom’s perspective. As far as he is concerned, the distinctions do not resolve what he sees. What he sees are simply “contradictions within one person.”