Once you become a WNBA fan, there’s no turning back. And now that we’re in the off-season, we’re searching for a place to put all our obsessive feelings about our favorite players. If you’re in the same boat, allow me to introduce our friend, Maddy Brown.
Maddy has been combining her love of the WNBA with her skills in math and coding (she’s literally a Math PhD candidate). She’s the face of @wnbadata, a TikTok page where she presents her findings on WNBA stats, from investigating player’s performances to fact checking coach’s bold claims.
But we were first introduced to Maddy when her WNBA junk journal came across our fyp.
It’s a hobby passed down from her mom, she tells us. Maddy’s mom collects old children’s books and rebinds the spine with scrap paper and other found material. The journal begins as a blank canvas for Maddy, with hidden fold-out pages and a variety of different paper.
There are no real rules to a junk journal, Maddy explains to us. It’s the game of one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure. Pieces from a board game found in the bottom of the Good Will bins, coffee-dyed pages of old homework, it’s all fair game.
When Cheryl Reeves was suspended, Maddy went straight to the drawing board.
She even embodied Cheryl with a handwritten list of all of her grievances.
Maddy also documented Sandy Brondello getting fired, casting her paper cut-outs as Spongebob characters, because why not! If you have a Squidward sticker laying around, use it!
Bonus addition: Maddy’s Bill Belichick page. Follow your heart, even if it takes you out of the WNBA fandom for a second. We know you’ll always find your way home.
Thank you so much Maddy for sharing your amazing junk journal with us. Our post-season depression is alleviated — we’re inspired.
There’s still plenty to process and unpack from this season. We’ve become attached to our favorite players and we can’t let them go. Luckily, some will be playing in Unrivaled. And others we’ll just have to Instagram stalk and make junk journal collages for them. Time to get crafty.
Xoxo,
Tunnel Wars
My hobbies are literally saving my life!! Also, very well written