Three generations
of Missouri Tigers

Jim and Paula Cunningham

Her father, Jim, played football for Missouri; her mother, Paula, was a Tiger in track and field. Both are named in Missouri's own biography of their daughter and in the WNBA's. Signing with Missouri meant playing where they had competed, in the town she was born in, in front of people who had followed the family for two decades.

The Athletic described Paula as a former collegiate javelin thrower. ESPN reported that Jim went to high school in Columbia, and that Paula grew up on the family farm east of town and was a multi-sport standout at North Callaway High School before Missouri.

Her sister, Lindsey

Her older sister, Lindsey Cunningham, played guard at Missouri as well, and their careers overlapped for two seasons in the same backcourt. Lindsey's final home game at Missouri was played with Sophie on the roster.

Missouri's staff biography records the shape of that career. Lindsey played 129 games, two short of the programme record, and finished second in Missouri history in career three-point percentage (40.6) and ninth in career assists (310). She scored 555 points with 369 rebounds. As a redshirt-senior captain she led the team in minutes, free-throw percentage and three-point percentage, on the way to a second straight NCAA Tournament. She then joined the programme as a graduate student manager, working on opponent film and the scout team.

The sisters played together long before Missouri. Mizzou's own account of Sophie's early years quotes their mother: at five, Sophie was already playing soccer on her older sister's team. Both girls played soccer, volleyball and basketball growing up. How those sports fed into her basketball is on the biography page.

The two remain publicly close. They sat down together for a local Columbia interview in January 2026, and together with Norm Stewart, the former Missouri men's coach, they founded the Sophie Cunningham Classic, a Columbia basketball event that staged its fourth edition that same month.

The wider family

Missouri's biography adds that an aunt played basketball for the Tigers and that an uncle and a grandfather played football there. It does not name them. ESPN's feature names the aunt as Stacy, Paula's sister, and says their mother, Elizabeth “Sissy” Primus, played six-on-six basketball and baseball on boys' teams.

The farm, about 30 miles east

Mechelle Voepel's ESPN feature on her senior season described where she went when Columbia became too much: her grandparents' farm, roughly 30 miles east of town. She framed it as a retreat rather than a hobby. She was a home-town player at her home-town university, the most recognisable name on a nationally ranked team, in the place where everyone already knew her surname. Thirty miles east, none of that applied.

The programme the whole family played for is on the Missouri years page.