As a child, New York Liberty forward Jonquel Jones would spend Saturday afternoons in a hair salon in her native Bahamas waiting several hours for her hairstylist sister, Niya, to squeeze her in between appointments and style her hair. 

Jones, who describes her natural hair type as 4C, a thick and coily texture, initially wore a perm, but when she was playing sports, constant sweating and tight ponytails made her hair prone to breakage. Though her sister would tell her, “Beauty is pain, suck it up,” Jones began to believe locs, a style where curly and coily natural hair is twisted or interlocked with a tool to make rope-like strands, ultimately would be healthier for her hair. After pleading with her mother, Jones finally got permission to make the change in 2008, when she was in seventh grade. 

Now, nearly two decades later, Jones’ hair has grown to waist length, and she is one of dozens of WNBA players with locs. While their hair textures and lengths may vary, for many Black female basketball players who wear the style, locs are a labor of love that illustrates their personal stories in basketball and life. 

When Jones first decided to loc her hair, she said, her loctician – a hairstylist who specializes in maintaining locs – provided support and encouragement. 

“She was just like, ‘Oh, my God, you got the perfect hair texture for locs. Like, your hair holds in moisture, and it absorbs moisture, your hair is gonna look so good,’” Jones told Andscape. “And I feel like she really spoke a lot of life, love and light into my hair as she was starting my locs and gave me a good foundation.”

Locing her hair taught Jones to go with her gut feeling even if it rubs against the status quo, she said. Despite their initial hesitancy, everyone in Jones’ immediate family now loves her locs and tells her they can’t imagine her with a different hairstyle. 

“Just like everything that we do in the Black community, we take things that people consider to be things that should be thrown away or things that are considered low, and we turn and flip [it],” she said. “We make it creative. We make it cool, and we make other people want to get in on it.”

She’s intentional about which products locticians use in her hair during retwists and moisturizes her locs with Argan oil, Moroccan oil and tea tree oil. At night, she wears a bonnet to protect her hair from lint, and when the Liberty won the franchise’s first WNBA championship last season, Jones celebrated in the locker room while wearing a shower cap to protect her hair from the champagne showers. 

Jones is proud of her Bahamian heritage, and her locs have additional cultural meaning for her. 

“Locs are just so Black,” she said. “It’s us as Black people. It’s self-expression. It also allows our natural hair to thrive. … People’s hair just naturally grows when it’s loced because it’s just the right type of style for the type of hair that we have, and it complements us so well.”

Nneka Ogwumike 

Seattle Storm forward Nneka Ogwumike identifies with rapper Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” lyric “tougher than Nigerian hair,” describing her natural hair as a thicker type than 4C. 

The Nigerian American first thought about changing her hair after playing overseas and not having a beautician to do her hair. She began her loc journey by growing out her natural hair for two years in protective styles like braids while researching the various sizes and parting shapes for locs.

“I started looking into locs because I was like, I would really love for my hair just to be my hair on my head,” Ogwumike said. “I just started having this idea around, ‘I refuse to believe that our [Black women’s] hair can’t grow long.’ I saw it all the time with people with locs.”

She decided to loc her hair in 2018 using the size and part structure of her box braids as a blueprint. She faithfully gets her hair retwisted every month, sometimes twice a month depending on her schedule. Her cardinal rule for maintaining her locs is that when she’s home, her locs aren’t out – she wears a “loc sock” satin covering that protects her hair. Her daily hair routine includes some “spritz” hairspray for her edges and her own special blend of scalp oil, which includes carrier oil, almond oil, rosemary and lavender. 

Ogwumike now sports 131 individual locs that extend past her shoulder and offer her multiple options for different hairstyles. The “budding” stage – the early stage of locs where the hair is forming knots and the strands won’t easily unravel – taught her important lessons: Let your hair breathe, fall in love with your face and have patience. 

Her locs reflect her “intentional” approach to life, she said.

“I appreciate things as they are, and I understand that great things take time because we live in this culture of, like, grind and instant return, and I feel like people who want a quick fix probably don’t have locs,” Ogwumike said. “I just really love the natural essence of locs, but I want my locs to tell the story of versatility. You know, we [Black women] don’t have to just be one thing, and the things that make us who we are, are intricate.”

This upcoming WNBA season, 11 of the 13 WNBA teams will have at least one player with locs on the roster. Ogwumike remembers when she was growing up the most prominent Black women wearing locs were singers Lauryn Hill and India Arie. She’s thrilled WNBA players can now offer more mainstream hair representation for young Black girls.

“I think young women are settling into the versatility of their hair,” Ogwumike said. “That is interesting, because our hair has been weaponized [and] it’s been political for so long. For the most part, we had to cover it, or we had to assimilate. There was a negative connotation in getting extensions or weave because it was viewed as you’re trying to fit in. It projected the limitations that society puts on how we can do our hair.

“Our hair can do everything. Locs are one of those ‘everything.’ … It’s not just hair – it’s expression, history, culture, and it’s legacy in so many different ways, and for people to recognize the beauty of it, I think, is something that I really do appreciate.”

Madison Scott

Newly drafted Dallas Wings guard Madison Scott is following in the footsteps of her mother, father and various other family members who wear locs.

The Maryland native decided to loc her hair in the seventh grade when she started taking basketball more seriously. For Scott, having locs has allowed her to focus on perfecting her skills – no other hairstyle would work for her.

“Every ounce of passion that I exhibit on the court, you can honestly see in my locs. The length, too, symbolizes growth,” Scott said. “I’m a work in progress. … I’m doing everything I can to be the best person I can be and grow each and every day.”

Her locs “visualize my life over time,” Scott said, and the process of getting them to their current length parallels her growth during her basketball career.

“I didn’t start off this long. … I’m not always going to start at the top – I’m gonna start where I am,” she said. “But if I keep working and going after everything I put my mind to … you see the finished product.”

In the decade she has had her locs, Scott has had only four lociticians do her hair. She’s also adamant on allowing at least eight weeks in between getting her hair retwisted because she wants her hair to “wolf” – allowing her natural hair to grow out long and thick before locing it. 

She also does a detox with her hair every few weeks to wash out product buildup and sweat from practices. In between styles, Scott uses organic products such as coconut and tea tree oils on her locs to enhance their shine and reduce breakage.

Scott, who is very interested in fashion, said she has learned how to work her locs into her overall look during “rough patches” when she’s in between hairstyles, laying her edges and using hats as accessories. 

“I tell people all the time dreads are not for everybody, and the reason why I say that is because you go through those rough patches and then those good patches. … Everybody can’t deal with the roughness and the new growth and all that,” Scott said. 

“I just find a way to go with the roughness. Because I’m different and my style is different, sometimes the roughness goes with the look I’m going with.”

Jaloni Cambridge

Ohio State guard Jaloni Cambridge’s only rule when it comes to her hair is that her mother, Stephanie, is the only person allowed to do it. Cambridge’s mother is a hairstylist who specializes in coloring and doing natural textured Black hair.

After Cambridge decided to transfer to Montverde Academy, a Florida high school hundreds of miles away from her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, she and her mother decided together that Cambridge would get locs in November 2022 to maintain her natural hair while she was away.

During the past season, Cambridge’s mother traveled to Columbus, Ohio, for Ohio State’s home games to help her daughter, who earned Big Ten Freshman of the Year honors, style her hair and to give her fresh retwists.

The mother-daughter duo also has experimented with color, with the student-athlete sporting purple, blue, green and blonde tips at the end of her locs. She and her mom spend time strategizing about various hair colors to try, and if Cambridge doesn’t like the color, they change it immediately. Watching her mother wear color in her hair most of her life motivated Cambridge to do the same.  

“It just inspired me to just do what she’s doing. Who doesn’t want to look up to their own mother?” she said. “I just trusted my mom because she was the hairstylist, and she knows what she was doing.”

Cambridge’s daily hair routine includes oiling her scalp and putting her locs in a ponytail for basketball practice, and at night she sleeps on satin pillowcases and wears a durag and bonnet.

Currently, her locs are shoulder length, and her go-to hairstyle is half up, half down. Watching her locs grow has made Cambridge fall in love with her hair. She’s eager to see its growth after each style but tries to wait before taking her hair down. 

“I had been wanting a ponytail for so long, and I finally got it. Now we’re just working on the high ponytail, but I got the back ponytail, so we’re almost there,” Cambridge said. “There were stages where I didn’t want my hair to be shown. …  I just needed patience and growth, and I think this just signifies who I am as a person.”

Seimone Augustus

“A lion without a mane” is how LSU assistant women’s basketball coach Seimone Augustus describes herself before she decided to forgo her Allen Iverson-inspired cornrows in favor of locs while she was a player at the university. 

Long before Augustus and Rebekkah Brunson led the Minnesota Lynx to four WNBA championships (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017), Augustus recalls being mesmerized by Brunson’s locs at a Team USA practice back when both were in college players in the early 2000s.

Augustus’ parents weren’t initially receptive to her having locs, and she had to dispel their misconceptions about the hairstyle.

“It was a process kind of teaching them about locs,” she said. “The perception change happened because [my mom] was able to see me and my essence and my aura. [She said] ‘This is the best hairstyle that you’ve had since you’ve been alive. Like, this really fits you.’”

Six games into the 2009 WNBA season, Augustus suffered her first major career injury, tearing her ACL. Knowing that she was going to have a long recovery ahead of her, she decided to cut off her original signature locs and restart them.

“I was, like, I just need something new. I’m from Louisiana, so I gotta get that juju off of me. Most people change their hair or they change their body or whatever it is. When they change it, that means they’re transitioning to something else,” Augustus said. “I wanted to show that I was more focused on coming back and being better.

“​​Everything after that was just, like, championships, and so many great things happened in my life – not saying that that was because of the locs, but it may have been because of the courage to transition and evolve as a human being, and that was a part of that process.”

Over the years she has learned the importance of getting her locs trimmed to maintain their fullness and shape, and she uses rosewater, coconut oil, black castor oil, and vitamin C and D supplements in caring for her hair.

Augustus recalls instances of her long locs hitting her in the face while she was a player, but now that she is on the sidelines, Augustus is eagerly waiting for her locs to reach her waist.

When her WNBA career was winding down, she spoke with former players about whether to keep her locs as she was uncertain they would be accepted in a professional workplace. Now, Augustus and Ole Miss head coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin are both prominent SEC coaches with locs. Augustus hopes their example can help people with different loc styles, such as free-form locs — locs formed without manipulation — and wicks, locs formed when existing locs are grouped together to create larger and thicker locs.

“Now they have at least two women that they can point to to say, ‘Well, look at them.’ … Locs have become ingrained in part of the culture,” Augustus said. “That’s what people normally see now, and having that presence in those spaces continues to make it normal. 

“People view [free-form locs and wicks] way differently than they view mine, because mine are uniform. So we’re kind of opening up the door, I believe, for people that do have different types of hair, textures and different styles in the loc family. I believe us showing up and representing that will help everyone else after us.”