Sarah Ashlee Barker and Emily Engstler are not dating. Fans of the WNBA jumped to false conclusions.
The second-year shooting guard just likes to rep her teammates during the pregame tunnel walk.
There are a lot of WNBA couples. This is not one of them.
Emily Engstler played into the fake WNBA gossip.
This whole thing started on Monday night. The Portland Fire traveled to New York to play the Liberty.
Sarah Ashlee Barker, the No. 9 overall pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft, arrived to Barclays Center in a throwback Louisville jersey. She wore No. 21 for her teammate, Emily Engstler. Engstler played for the Cardinals during the 2021-2022 women’s college basketball season and reached the Final Four. She averaged a career-high 11.9 points on 46% shooting with 9.4 rebounds per game that season.
Ashlee Barker wore a jersey with Engstler’s name on the back during the pregame tunnel walk. The frontcourt-backcourt duo arrived to the game together and shared an elaborate handshake for the cameras.
— Portland Fire (@theportlandfire) May 25, 2026
WNBA fans are messy. They immediately started to speculate that the above video is an official hard launch. Engstler is a well-known figure within the league’s LGBTQ community. Maybe this was Ashlee Barker’s way of coming out of the closet.
Engstsler even played into the chatter with a comment on Barker’s Instagram.
She called her “girlfriend” with a wink.
So are they dating? WNBA fans are monitoring the situation, and technically speaking, we don’t know that they are not dating. But the choice of jersey has nothing to do with it…
Ashlee Barker and Engstler are not together. They are not in a relationship. (Probably. Definitely.)
Sarah Ashlee Barker wears her Portland Fire teammates’ jerseys.
WNBA fans created this relationship narrative based on the pregame arrival on Monday. Sarah Ashlee Barker wore Emily Engstler’s jersey and walked in together so they must be dating. Right? Wrong.
This is a new thing that Ashlee Barker does. She wore Bridget Carleton’s jersey just a few days prior.
— Portland Fire (@theportlandfire) May 26, 2026
The team made the following post on Tuesday after the Engstler jersey went viral on Monday. It was almost as if the administration wanted to clear things up on Ashlee Barker’s behalf. (I bet that is exactly what happened.)
Case closed. Sarah Ashlee Barker and Emily Engstler are not in a relationship. The former wore the latter’s college jersey to a game. The latter made a joke on Instagram. Y’all relax.