Paige Bueckers Wins the Dawn Staley Award as Kayla McBride Takes the Seasonlong Community Assist

Paige Bueckers spent her second WNBA season becoming one of the league's best guards. She spent the off days going home.

The WNBA named the Dallas Wings guard the winner of the 2026 Dawn Staley Community Leadership Award on Thursday, Nov. 5, per WNBA.com (opens in a new tab). The same day, the league gave Minnesota Lynx guard Kayla McBride the 2026 Seasonlong WNBA Cares Community Assist Award, per WNBA.com (opens in a new tab). A committee of WNBA and NBA leadership picked both winners.

Bueckers Goes Back to Minnesota

The Staley award has existed since 2008 and is named for the Hall of Famer and South Carolina coach. It goes to a current player who reflects Staley's leadership, charitable work, love of the game and ability to inspire, according to the league. Past winners include Tina Charles, Kelsey Mitchell and Betnijah Laney.

A lot of Bueckers' work this year happened in Minnesota, where she grew up and played at Hopkins High School before UConn and a 2025 Rookie of the Year season in Dallas. Per the league, Bueckers teamed with Gatorade to refurbish a court she played on as a kid. She donated $25,000 to Athletic Committed Enlightened Scholars, a nonprofit that supports student-athletes, and $50,000 to the Hopkins Education Foundation. She ran a free camp for 95 middle and high school girls in Minnetonka, and with Goodr she funded a free grocery store inside Hopkins West Junior High School.

She did not skip Dallas, either. Bueckers played in the Wings' Unified Game with Special Olympics of North Texas, mentored 12 kids on the Dallas Wings Dream Team, showed up at the team's All Girls Summer Camp and donated signed memorabilia to the Dallas Wings Community Foundation. The foundation's fifth-anniversary Kicks for a Cause event raised more than $120,000, according to the WNBA.

The award comes with a $10,000 league donation to a charity of the winner's choice. Bueckers picked Good Sports, a nonprofit that provides equipment, apparel and footwear to kids in high-need communities.

"Paige Bueckers embodies the spirit of what this award, established in my name, represents," Staley said in the league's release. Bueckers framed it as a debt she is paying back. "I want to pay that forward by using my platform to create opportunities for the next generation," she said.

Wings head coach Jose Fernandez called Bueckers a role model for young athletes and a leader in the community, per the release.

McBride's Year in the Twin Cities

McBride's award recognizes a full season of community work, and the league's list is long. She has partnered with the Washburn Center for Children since 2024, mentoring kids and families and hosting the center at a Lynx game. The WNBA also credited her for speaking openly about her own mental health, which the release says has helped chip away at the stigma around it.

In September, McBride mentored eight middle school girls from Girl Scouts and from the Hallie Q. Brown and Sabathani community centers. She visited pediatric patients at Mayo Clinic Children's, took a seventh grader on a $1,000 back-to-school shopping trip at Target, welcomed a 12-year-old from Special Olympics Minnesota onto the Jr. Lynx Dream Team and spoke at the Lynx Changemakers Summit on leadership and perseverance.

The WNBA is donating $20,000 on McBride's behalf, split evenly between Play Your Way! MN, which creates athletic opportunities for kids, and Girl Scouts River Valleys.

"Minnesota has become home for me," McBride said in the release. Lynx president of business operations Carley Knox put it more bluntly: "Community impact is not something she does, it is who she is."

Why These Awards Land Differently Now

End-of-season awards usually belong to the stat sheet. A'ja Wilson took MVP again, Angel Reese won Defensive Player of the Year and Olivia Miles was the unanimous Rookie of the Year. These two honors measure something else, and in 2026 they arrive with a bigger audience than ever. The league just finished a season with record attendance and a Finals that was the most-watched since 1999.

That reach is the point. Bueckers is one of the most recognizable players in the sport, a second-team All-WNBA pick this season on a Wings team building around her and No. 1 pick Azzi Fudd. When someone with that following spends her summer rebuilding a childhood court and stocking a school grocery store, the kids in Hopkins notice. So does everyone else.

McBride is the other model, a veteran who calls Minnesota home now and has stuck with the same partners, like Washburn, since 2024. Different stages of a career, same idea.

For Bueckers, this is another line on a résumé that is filling up fast. For McBride, it is recognition for the work that rarely makes a highlight package. Both are reminders that the best thing about this league's growth is what the players are doing with it.

Sources: WNBA.com, Bleacher Report and Yahoo Sports. More WNBA coverage on Undrafted.

Photo: WNBA.