This profile on Satou and Nyara Sabally is part of Glamour’s 2025 Women of the Year package honoring five remarkable WNBA players. See them all here.
Satou Sabally was on the phone with her sister Nyara right before our Zoom call, discussing how they’d handle their first playoff face-off the very next week.
“I think now it was all more so enjoying the moment and really being excited for each other,” the 27-year-old Phoenix Mercury player tells me while getting her blonde hair braided for the playoffs (her nail look features “Mighty Mercury” painted across them). “But this is the first time this is actually pretty serious, so we’re like, ‘Okay, well are we going to talk about what happens afterwards about the different scenarios?’”
What does happen afterwards? “You give the other person probably a little space after,” 25-year-old Nyara, who plays for the New York Liberty, guesses when she and I chat the next day. “There’s no bad blood or anything.… You might be upset a little about the situation afterwards, but it’s nothing. We’ll still probably hang out after the game.”
By now we know the Mercury defeated the Liberty in round one of the playoffs, so the Sabally sisters can move on to planning their next few months together in Miami, where Satou will be playing in Unrivaled, the three-on-three basketball league, while Nyara takes a break during the off-season to rehab after a right knee injury kept her from playing for much of the Liberty’s regular season.
“I feel like my focus this off-season is to get as healthy as I possibly can so I can play a full season,” Nyara says. “That’s really the focus and just play to the abilities I know I can.”
This was just one of many injuries that have plagued the 25-year-old player since she left home in Germany to join her older sister at the University of Oregon in 2018. Such setbacks kept the sisters from really playing together in college, though they were able to share a jersey when they represented Germany in the 2024 Olympics.
The duo—along with their five other siblings—share a Gambian father and a German mother, spending their early childhoods in Gambia before moving to Berlin when Satou was seven years old and Nyara was around five. For Satou it was “a dream come true” to represent her country alongside her sister.
While Satou and Nyara Sabally share the same welcoming demeanor—during our calls, Satou invited me to take part in her selfie with her hairstylist, while Nyara gleefully showed me her 2024 championship ring and earrings, which she hadn’t yet put on display—they have vastly different personalities, on and off the court.
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“I feel like I’m not a very chippy player; that’s more Satou. I’m usually the calm one,” Nyara tells me, while Satou describes herself as a “social butterfly” and Nyara as more of a homebody.
“Nyara, she’ll play the piano at home. I’m the one dragging her out the house,” Satou says. “But one thing we do have in common is our love for food and traveling.” And clothes. And Burberry’s Goddess perfume.
It’s clear both players cherish their relationship and channel that energy when building camaraderie with their work sisters. “Even if you tease your sibling, you can’t do that all the time. There is a trust and a foundation that needs to be built in order to be able to do that,” Satou says. The same goes for the locker room.
“You go to war with them and you have to build trust. You have to learn how to communicate and really go through these family dynamics even in the locker room,” she explains, advising that conflicts should be handled internally and not taken to the media—at least, until after the season. “You still have to suit up and you still have to trust each other on the court.”
Still, Satou says, “once it comes to organizations, then I do think that the public power can be used to your strength.”
Since she studied social sciences and law in college, it was no surprise Satou jumped at the chance to join the league’s Social Justice Council organization during her first year in 2020. Satou is unafraid—no, she thrives on speaking truth to power, whether she’s discussing menstruation education, sustainability in the fashion industry, or mental health resources, all topics that came up naturally within our hour-long call.
Earlier this summer, the elder Sabally sister experienced significant online pushback for critiquing the league’s packed schedule after playing four games in six days—including two back-to-back games in separate states. “It’s like they don’t care about player safety,” Satou said at the time, fully aware that men would throw her CBA demands back in her face—and they did.
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“These players deserve more money but come on man, you gotta play back to backs,” professional basketball player Pat Beverley said in one social media clip. “It’s part of it…Don’t lose me.”
“I actually chuckled about his comment because he’s not even in the league anymore,” Satou responded with a smile. “That’s my first comment. My second comment is really looking at how much they get paid. They get paid to do these things. We don’t have a pension. I think we’re far away from comparing the MNBA to the WNBA because they get compensated fairly.”
When it comes to social media discourse surrounding the W, Satou and Nyara both take measures to avoid getting sucked in. Satou has two phones, keeping TikTok off the one she uses most often, knowing full well that “10 good comments will always be overshadowed by one bad comment.”
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Meanwhile, Nyara completely deleted X.com only to redownload it for Love Island commentary before deleting the app again. “I stay off of it, because I don’t even want to be engaged with that,” she says of content surrounding the W. “People on the internet are funny, but most of the time, it leans into the disrespectful. And then it’s like, Is this really still about basketball, or is this just about the person?”
Still, they’re both active on their own TikTok pages, with Nyara discussing books and fan fiction and matcha while Satou enjoys posting OOTDs, TikTok dances, and puppy content. “I feel like it’s just important to be busy off the court because our whole lives revolve around basketball,” Nyara says. “It’s nice to use your brain in other ways.”
While the Sabally sisters are sure to share their Miami escapades for the next few months, don’t expect them to go easy on one another next season.
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