Nikki Sapp is a former Miami Heat dancer, art gallery director, and middle school teacher who spent nearly seven years married to Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra before their amicable divorce in late 2023.
In the years since, she has become a public figure in her own right, shaped as much by hardship as by her connection to one of the NBA’s most respected coaches.
She has spoken publicly about getting sober after hitting rock bottom with alcohol in 2020, about a DUI arrest that became what she called her coming out into Miami society, about losing her mother, and about one of her children being diagnosed with cancer.
She built a podcast called The Know with Nikki Spo around those experiences, fought off repeated gold digger accusations tied to the timing of her divorce, and appears to have found a new relationship with a Miami family law attorney.
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Nikki Sapp Biography
She was born on March 22, 1987, in Florida. Nikki Sapp is half Puerto Rican, grew up in the Kendall area of Miami and attended Florida International University, earning a bachelor’s degree in art history in 2010.
She completed that degree while she was still a member of the Miami Heat dance team, balancing a college course load with a professional performance schedule.
Before her marriage made her a public figure, Sapp had already built a career across several fields.
She trained and performed as a professional dancer for years, later taught dance, and also worked as a middle school teacher, a role she has described as formative in how she talks to her own children today.
After finishing her degree, she moved into the art world, taking a position as director of the Guy Hepner Contemporary Art Gallery in California.
This role allowed her to combine her academic background in art history with hands-on gallery management.
On her own website, she has described herself as an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, and a dog mom, alongside her identity as a mother and former Teacher of the Year.
Career
ANikki Sapp danced for the Miami Heat from 2005 to 2008. She met Erik Spoelstra during that time, although their relationship did not begin until after she had already left the dance team, a detail that she and Spoelstra have both been careful to make clear given how the optics of a coach dating a current dancer would appear.
The two were not publicly linked until 2013, when Spoelstra brought her to a fundraiser hosted by Heat broadcasters, well after her time on the team had ended.
In 2021, while still married to Spoelstra, Sapp launched her own podcast, The Know with Nikki Spo, built around highlighting the stories of what she calls tenacious women.
Since her divorce, the show has become her primary public platform, with episodes covering sobriety, single motherhood, coparenting, dating after divorce, business and entrepreneurship, and emotional and spiritual wellness.
She has also appeared as a guest on other shows to discuss her own story, including an episode of the WeGottaTalk podcast where the host described her as someone who has walked through the fire of a child’s cancer diagnosis, a very public divorce and getting sober, and done so with grace.
On social media, she has marked sobriety milestones publicly, at one point noting she had reached 1,321 consecutive sober days.
Erik Spoelstra’s Ex-Wife
Nikki Sapp and Spoelstra got engaged in 2015 and married in July 2016, settling in Coral Gables, Florida.
They had three children together: sons Santiago Ray and Dante Nicholas, and daughter Ruby. For years, the couple maintained a relatively private family life even as Spoelstra’s profile in the NBA grew, guiding the Heat to two championships and, in 2023, an improbable run to the NBA Finals as the eighth seed, the first team to do so since the 1999 New York Knicks.
Behind that public stability, Sapp has since revealed that she was privately navigating an alcohol addiction that hit its lowest point in 2020, during the early part of the pandemic.
She has said that she was newly sober while married to a public figure and going through what she called a very real reckoning with her identity, trying to work out who she was becoming as a grown woman and a mother.
During that same period, she also lost her mother. She went through her family’s experience of one of her children being diagnosed with cancer, describing the years leading up to her divorce as a period of walking through fire.
The Divorce and the Gold Digger Backlash
Sapp and Spoelstra announced their divorce in a joint statement to the Miami Herald on November 29, 2023, saying they had made the difficult yet amicable decision to jointly file to end their marriage after seven years together formally.
They said they remained grateful for their relationship and fully committed to raising their children, with their children remaining their shared priority.
The divorce filing followed in January 2024, and the settlement terms, including how their marital property was divided, have never been made public.
The timing of the announcement created a problem for Sapp that had nothing to do with the marriage itself. Just weeks after the divorce became public, the Heat signed Spoelstra to an eight-year contract extension worth roughly $120 million, the most lucrative coaching deal in NBA history at the time.
Online critics accused Sapp of poor timing, with some saying she had “fumbled the bag” by divorcing him right before the extension.
Sapp rejected the accusation directly on Instagram, telling her followers to be nicer and pushing back against what she called a crass and uninformed assumption that any woman who leaves a successful man must have been in it for the money in the first place, or that a woman who avoids a successful partner altogether is foolish.
She has repeated a version of that defense multiple times since, including in a Miami Herald interview as recently as April 2026, where she said people are far too quick to label women gold diggers without knowing what actually happened inside a relationship.
In that same interview, Sapp spoke about her DUI arrest, describing her mugshot as her coming out into Miami society and saying she felt enormous shame and embarrassment stepping into what she called a cruel world.
She connected the arrest to the period when she was newly sober and married to a public figure, framing it as part of a larger reckoning.
Dating Life
In early 2025, rumors began circulating that Sapp was in a relationship with Miami Heat forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. Sapp addressed the speculation directly in an Instagram video, firmly denying any relationship with Jaquez and pushing back on the rumor the way she has handled other unwanted attention.
By November 2025, Sapp appeared to confirm a new relationship, this time with Kody Trespalacios, a Miami-based family law associate.
Trespalacios earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from Florida State University in 2017 before completing his law degree at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law in 2020, and he now practices family law, handling cases involving prenuptial agreements, high net worth divorces and child custody matters.
Sapp’s Instagram feed through late 2025 showed the two together on multiple occasions, including a kiss on the cheek and a Halloween celebration with her children, effectively confirming the relationship without a formal announcement.
That same period brought Spoelstra briefly back into headlines for an unrelated reason: a fire broke out at his Miami-Dade home in the early hours of November 6, 2025, while he was traveling back from a road game in Denver.
No one was injured, and Sapp and the couple’s three children were reported safe, since they no longer live at that residence following the divorce.
Spoelstra has not been publicly linked to a new relationship and remains focused on coaching the Heat, now in his 19th season with the franchise.
At the same time, Sapp continues building her podcast and raising Santiago, Dante and Ruby in South Florida.