Kysre Gondrezick Becomes First Black Professional Athlete To Front a Playboy Shoot

Kysre Gondrezick has swapped her WNBA jersey for a very different kind of spotlight — and made history in the process.

The former Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky guard has been unveiled as Playboy’s Miss June 2025, becoming the first Black professional athlete to hold a Playmate title with the magazine, a milestone she proudly celebrated on Instagram.

“Playboy’s 2025 Miss June. Proud to be the first Black professional athlete in history to ever grace Playboy magazine and this year’s centerfold,” she wrote, sharing a carousel of retro-inspired images from the shoot.

Within hours, the photos were everywhere — and fans were losing their minds. Sports blogs, WNBA fan accounts and celebrity pages amplified the shots, praising her confidence and style and calling the moment “iconic” and “history in real time.”

Why the Kysre Gondrezick Playboy cover moment matters

For Gondrezick, this isn’t just a viral photoshoot — it’s a statement about control, image and what it means to be an athlete in 2025.

In her interview with Playboy, she pushes back on the idea that she’s “leaving” basketball for something else.

“What people label as a transition, I embody as evolution,” she said. “I’m not stepping outside who I am. I’m building a multidimensional brand.”

That framing matters. Women in sport are often boxed into narrow roles: serious competitor or glamorous public figure, but rarely both on their own terms. Gondrezick is very openly choosing “both” — a pro career that continues (she’s set to join Athletes Unlimited Pro Basketball in 2026) and a parallel path in fashion and modelling.

Her Playmate debut also lands at a time when the WNBA’s cultural visibility is exploding — from Caitlin Clark headlines to Vogue covers and brand deals for stars across the league. Gondrezick’s cover moment extends that energy into a space historically dominated by models and Hollywood names, not active or recently active pro athletes.

Fans react: “from the court to an era-defining shoot”

The reaction online has been loud and overwhelmingly supportive.

• Sports sites like The Spun and BlackSportsOnline framed it as a true “break the internet” moment, with headlines about her Playboy photoshoot having fans “losing their minds.”

• Social pages have shared side-by-side photos of Gondrezick in game action and in the Playboy shoot, celebrating her versatility and calling her “proof that you can be elite on and off the court.”

There’s also a deeper current in the praise: many commenters highlight what it means to see a Black woman athlete owning her image, negotiating her deals and telling her own story in a space that hasn’t always been inclusive.

From WNBA lottery pick to multidimensional brand

Before any of this, Kysre Gondrezick was best known as a top-four pick in the 2021 WNBA Draft, a dynamic scoring guard out of West Virginia who spent time with the Indiana Fever and later the Chicago Sky.

In the Playboy piece, she’s clear that the discipline that got her to the league is the same drive behind this new chapter:

“Becoming a WNBA player and getting to that level, you put in a lot of work to get there. You have to put in even more work to stay there,” she says — a mindset she now applies to building her off-court career as well.

With her Miss June 2025 feature, upcoming run in Athletes Unlimited, and an increasingly visible presence in fashion and media, Gondrezick is positioning herself as exactly what she says she wants to be: a multidimensional brand, not just a box score.

The headline may be about being the first Black professional athlete to front a Playboy shoot — but the bigger story is an athlete rewriting what her post-WNBA prime can look like.