IT’S HARD TO stand out on the frenetic streets of SoHo in New York City, but on a frigid afternoon in December, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team bus—navy blue, emblazoned with the school’s Siberian husky logo, and taking up four or five parking spaces—is unmissable. Offcially, UConn is in town for the inaugural Shark Beauty Women’s Champions Classic in Brooklyn. The women have detoured into Manhattan to celebrate the first Nike Player Edition shoe released by a college athlete, the Paige Bueckers G.T. Hustle 3, designed by the Huskies star guard, a.k.a. Paige Buckets.
The baby blue and lavender shoes, with Bueckers’s name on the heel, represent a pinnacle of what’s possible at the dawn of the lucrative NIL era, which allows student-athletes to profit from their name,…
