College women’s basketball reached tremendous heights during the 2023–2024 season spurred on by Caitlin Clark’s broken records, the South Carolina Gamecocks’ undefeated season, and Clark’s matchups against LSU’s Angel Reese. While these created amazing media attention for collegiate women’s basketball, it is important to recognize one more standout. Alissa Pili, former University of Utah Ute and current Minnesota Lynx (first round and 8th pick overall in the WNBA 2024 draft), is Samoan and a descendant of the Inupiat tribe in Alaska. She inspires fans from both communities to travel from hours away to see her play and thus serves as a powerful media influencer. This case study offers a rhetorical analysis that contextualizes the media representation by and of Pili against past representations of Native American media images while also analyzing how a university that uses a Native American (Utes) mascot marketed and advertised a player who is part of the Indigenous community. This analysis incorporates Logan’s (2021) corporate responsibility to race framework regarding public relations and provides guidance for the media representation of collegiate athletes. We found progress as the coverage of Pili challenges past stereotypes and highlights the power of representation for communities of color, especially underrepresented and often marginalized Indigenous communities. Pili’s example offers an opportunity to examine the intersections of gender, race, media, and collegiate sport in unique ways, and a rhetorical analysis allows us to compare media representations over time. Pili represents successful and positive media representation across multiple communities and identities.