Almost everyone in Hopkins, Minnesota has a story about Paige Bueckers.
After five years as the face of the UConn women’s basketball team, Bueckers is practically a household name even among fans who don’t closely follow the sport. But her hometown still knows her as the beloved Hopkins High School superstar who won the 2019 state championship and never turned down the chance to engage with a fan.
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At a Hopkins City Council meeting on April 15, the day after Bueckers was selected No. 1 in the 2025 WNBA Draft by the Dallas Wings, council member Aaron Kuznia reminisced about Bueckers’ final game for Hopkins in 2020, a state semifinal win the day before the championship was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. His son and daughter, then in elementary school, were in attendance and waited among a crowd of hundreds of young fans after the victory, desperate to get the No. 1 recruit’s autograph before she left for Connecticut. Bueckers didn’t skip a single one.
“There were NBA players there at that game, it was a big deal,” Kuznia said. “I remember seeing the athletes leaving the locker room and some of the other ones saying, ‘Hey we’re going to Davanni’s to celebrate our victory tonight.’ Paige said, ‘I’ll catch up with you.’ … There were over 200 kids standing in that line, and she could have left with the team well before that and just went to Davanni’s. I just think that speaks to her character.”
Kuznia’s memory was sparked in the meeting by a resolution introduced by Hopkins special projects and initiatives manager Laila Imihy, which proposed the city rename itself Paige Bueckers, Minnesota on May 16, the day Bueckers plays her first regular season WNBA game in Dallas against the Minnesota Lynx. The council went on to vote unanimously in favor of the resolution, and Hopkins mayor Patrick Hanlon added his own endorsement of Bueckers’ character.
“I think it’s very fitting we’re naming the entire city after Paige,” Hanlon said. “Being a city is a team sport … and one of the things that makes her a champion, in watching (UConn’s) games, is not just that she scores a lot of points, but the next game she’ll be crashing the boards for rebounds and the next she’ll be leading in assists. It’s just really amazing to watch … I was just at a foundation event where she had donated some items to that event, so just a good person on and off the court.”
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Imihy is a longtime women’s basketball fan and season ticket holder for the Lynx, so she was closely following UConn during its 2025 NCAA Tournament run. After Bueckers helped lead the Huskies to their first national championship since 2016, Imihy felt it was a no-brainer that her hometown should do something to recognize the accomplishment. At first Imihy was planning a simple resolution for the city to formally congratulate Bueckers, but city manager Mike Mornson came into the office the day after the NCAA championship game wanting to go bigger to honor the former Hopkins superstar.
The naming is mostly honorary — so no, babies born May 16 won’t have Paige Bueckers as the city on their birth certificates as Imihy saw some suggest on social media — but it will serve as a launching point to make Hopkins a “home base” for women’s sports fans as Bueckers makes her professional debut. Imihy said there are plans to involve local businesses to promote the WNBA season opener and recognize Bueckers with branding throughout the city on the day of its renaming.
“I think people are really excited. Our business community is awesome, and they are usually pretty game for fun ideas like this,” Imihy said. “We’ve tried to push our businesses to be creative, too. We don’t want it to just be all focused on just the game that night. We have bookstores in town, we have coffee shops, there’s all kinds of businesses, so we’re really trying to encourage people to come up with some creative ideas to be involved.”
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Bueckers has remained deeply involved her local community since departing for UConn in 2020. She opened a free grocery store at Hopkins West Junior High School in 2023 through an NIL partnership with Chegg and Goodr and worked with StockX to revitalize the basketball court at her elementary school in 2022. She also paid homage to Hopkins with her player edition Nike GT Hustle 3 sneaker released in December, featuring the 612 area code stitched alongside Storrs’s 860 on the tongue of the shoe.
Bueckers grew up watching the Lynx dynasty led by UConn legend Maya Moore that won four WNBA titles from 2011-2017, and the franchise has long had one of the most consistent and dedicated fanbases in the league. But when Minnesota goes head-to-head with Bueckers, first in Dallas then in Minneapolis on May 21, Imihy believes you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in Hopkins cheering against their hometown hero.
“I think people will have a hard time in Minnesota choosing who to root for, but you win either way,” Imihy joked. “A lot of what I see, especially like on social media and stuff, is (people) saying she’s going to be a Lynx one day, she will be a Lynx player someday, so I think that would be the best outcome.”
