Photos of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham on a boat with a man identified by social media users as athletic trainer Frank Adams circulated widely Friday, after a fan account framed the images as her revealing a new boyfriend. The post and replies quickly became a flashpoint for competing narratives about Cunningham’s private life, her public image and interracial dating.
The collage, posted by the account Fever Updates, showed Cunningham, 30, in a bikini on a boat with a Black man wearing a life vest. In one frame he has an arm around her; in another he appears to kiss her on the forehead while she smiles. The post had more than 1.4 million views and thousands of replies within hours.
The pictures are from Cunningham’s delayed 30th birthday gathering at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri during the WNBA’s midseason break for the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Cunningham turned 30 on Aug. 16, the same day the Fever played Atlanta. Her sister, Lindsey Cunningham Hudson, shared family photos and video of the later celebration, including time on the water and a cake. Mainstream coverage of the trip described it as a family-and-friends weekend. Neither Cunningham nor the man in the photos has issued a statement identifying him as her boyfriend.
Sophie Cunningham revealed her new boyfriend. pic.twitter.com/wfHZOLN1dt
— Fever Updates (@FeverUpdate) September 11, 2026
Online users have identified the man as Frank Adams, head athletic trainer for Grand Canyon University men’s basketball and a former assistant athletic trainer with the Phoenix Suns. Adams, an Atlanta native and former college basketball player, worked in Phoenix while Cunningham played for the Mercury from 2019 to 2024. Rumors linking the two date at least to early 2026, after she was seen at GCU games and in other photos with him, including at a bowling alley and around her Missouri Athletics Hall of Fame appearance. Neither has confirmed a romance.
Cunningham is not just another WNBA role player in the social-media age. After she was ejected in 2025 for retaliating after a hard foul on teammate Caitlin Clark, her following exploded. Conservative media and parts of the online right embraced her as a blunt, Midwestern counterweight in a league often framed as progressive. Coverage has called her a “lightning rod” and noted the “MAGA Barbie” nickname some fans used — a label she has not adopted. She has said she is “very much in the middle” politically while supporting restrictions on transgender athletes in women’s sports. That audience is a large part of why a rumor about whom she dates became a culture-war object rather than a gossip item.
Replies to the Fever Updates post ran in several directions at once.
Some users treated the photos as confirmation and reacted with disappointment or mockery aimed at fans who had idealized her. Comments included “scratch her off the list” and jokes that she was choosing a path toward becoming a single mother. Others tied the images to a separate news cycle about a Black holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, using both stories to needle people they called hypocrites on race.
A second cluster used racial slurs and stereotypes about Black men and white women who date them. Those posts were a visible part of the thread and are part of why the discussion felt uglier than a typical celebrity-dating rumor.
A third group treated the story as either harmless or welcome: friends on a boat, an interracial couple that should not be anyone’s business, or proof that personal attraction does not follow political branding. Some users who had followed the Adams rumors for months posted older photos and argued the relationship, if it exists, is not new.
Flip the pages for photos of Sophie Cunningham.
