Skylar Diggins-Smith: From South Bend Courts to WNBA Stardom

Skylar Diggins has always seen basketball as more than a sport; it’s long been a way of life for her. Diggins was brought up in South Bend, Indiana, where her father was a director at a local recreation center, and she was in the gym from day one, watching the Notre Dame women’s basketball team when she was a child and imagining that one day she would be playing on that very same court. By high school, Skylar was already a well-known player at Washington High School, having been named Indiana Miss Basketball twice, winning Gatorade National Player of the Year in 2009, and being co-MVP of the McDonald’s All-American Game. Skylar Diggins was a legend in the making. Diggins was so good, in fact, that her senior-year state championship game was moved to Lucas Oil Stadium to make room for about 18,000 excited fans to watch her growing legend at work.

Diggins would soon head to college and where she became the face of Notre Dame women’s basketball between 2009 and 2013. During her four years as a point guard for the Fighting Irish, Diggins earned a number of national awards, including two Big East Player of the Year titles, three selections to the First Team All-Big East, two appearances on the First Team All-American, and two wins of the Nancy Lieberman Award as the top point guard in the country. While she played before packed crowds at the Joyce Center, she also played on the road in some of the most demanding arenas in college basketball, including the PeoplesBank Arena (previously the XL Center) in Connecticut and Louisville’s Yum Center, in front of 15,000 passionate fans.

The Tulsa Shock (now the Dallas Wings) selected Skylar Diggins with the third pick in 2013. Since then, Diggins has spent over ten years in the WNBA building up a record that resembles a first ballot Hall of Fame career: she is a seven-time WNBA All-Star, has been chosen four times to the All-WNBA First Team, won the 2014 Most Improved Player award, and has played for the Tulsa Shock/Dallas Wings, the Phoenix Mercury, the Seattle Storm, and is now with the Chicago Sky. During this portion of her career, she has played in front of spectators in almost every type of basketball arena in the country, including sold-out loud crowds from Golden State’s Chase Center to Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

Now, officially out for the remainder of the season as she nurses an aggravated right knee injury, Diggins speaks to Pollstar/VenuesNow about the mental preparation required for the sport’s biggest arenas, the way the business of women’s basketball has changed around her, her campaign for better treatment of mothers in the league, and what she hopes the next generation will feel when they first step into an arena in the W.

This interview was originally conducted in August 2026 and has been edited for clarity.

Pollstar First and foremost, how are you feeling?

Skylar Diggins: I’m feeling good. I had to take some time away to deal with my health and my knee, and everything’s been progressing. I’m excited to be doing more every day, and excited for my team, who’s been playing some great basketball lately. I’m still rehabbing, but overall I feel really good. God bless.

Let’s take it back. Notre Dame, star player, taking the nation by storm. Was it always Notre Dame? And what was it like to play at the Joyce Center and become Captain Irish?

Growing up in Indiana, basketball is a way of life. In any other state, it’s a game. I was around it from a super early age. I used to go to Notre Dame games when I was six, seven, eight years old, and I remember that atmosphere. Notre Dame went to the Final Four in ’97 and won it in 2001. You really don’t realize how much we love basketball as Hoosiers until you leave the state. My dad was a director at a recreation center, so I always had access to play, and I noticed it opened a lot of doors.

When it was time to pick a school, I visited Stanford, and Nneka Ogwumike hosted me. I got in. But Notre Dame was a great fit, right around the corner, and I could play in front of family: my mom, my grandmother, my grandfather, my brother, my sister. And in front of people who were like family, who’d supported me in middle school and high school at South Bend Washington. Seeing all those familiar faces in the stands was priceless. Kids think they want to get far away, but staying home was special to me. I had a lot of success on that stage, and to this day it’s still rocking.

Was it jarring going from high school to the Joyce Center? I think it held maybe nine or ten thousand.

When South Bend Washington played Ben Davis in 2009, our state championship game was moved to Lucas Oil Stadium. I went to state all four years, and we had about 18,000 my senior year. In Indiana, crowds of three to five thousand weren’t unusual, and every night you’re in atmospheres with five to 15,000 people. Those are electric, and it always seems like something’s on the line. So the electricity of the fans wasn’t new to me. But playing for your hometown school was a lot of variables and elements. It brought home the essence of why I wanted to play Indiana basketball.

Was there a college arena where you and the team walked in and went, “Yo, what?”

Connecticut, and the XL Center (now known as the PeoplesBank Arena). UConn continues to be a powerhouse. When I was in school they had Maya Moore, Tina Charles, and Renee Montgomery on the same team. Those are the teams I faced in the old Big East, which was the shit. Everybody played in that conference. Georgetown was tough because the fans are right on top of you. At the Yum Center in Louisville, it’s 15,000 people and you think, “Where are you people coming from?” St. John’s gave you that old-school Indiana, in-the-trenches feel. But Storrs stands out. It was the beginning of our real rivalry, when we started winning some games too, so we were not liked at all. The environment was hostile, and you could lose the game in the first five minutes if you came out too tight. A lot of it was them feeding off the environment they’d built.

What did you develop to prepare mentally for those places? Was there a ritual?

I went to college in 2009, before Twitter was as prevalent, so you could literally unplug. And we were in school too, so you compartmentalize. Basketball is the center of your world, but you have other hats. I could go to my mom’s house or my granny’s house and unwind. My freshman year we had no pressure, because nobody expected us to be good. We’d lost in the first round at home the year before. It got harder my sophomore year, when we were playing in championship games and then you go viral on Twitter. But for me it’s the routine and the preparation. How you prepare usually equals how confident you are, and those reps take the thinking out of it, so you’re just playing ball. You didn’t put in all this work to play tight. The pressure we feel as athletes doesn’t really exceed the pressure we put on ourselves. Luckily I had Niele Ivey, one of the best in the industry, and Coach Muffet McGraw, a Hall of Famer. I’d say it was a combination of being at home with my family, being able to go straight to my mom, being really well coached, and having other outlets, like hanging with my real best friends, where it wasn’t all about performing.

From your Hall of Fame-and-a-half career at Notre Dame, you go first round to Tulsa. How was the transition to the W, when y’all were building on what previous generations did and laying the foundation for what we see now? Was there pressure?

There are always great players at the collegiate level, and the W just has a lot more of them. In college anybody can come off the bench and get 20, but the W runs more actions and everybody’s good. When I came in it was fewer teams, fewer games, every game counting. It was East versus West, and only four teams from each side got in. It wasn’t the best eight records. In the West, Minnesota was getting in every time, with Maya, Whalen, Brunson, and Sylvia. Diana and BG were getting in. Candace and Nneka were getting in. So there was one spot left, and we, San Antonio, and Seattle would fight for it. The W was so hard.

It was also being rebranded when BG, Elena, and I came in, so we were moving into a league in transition. I stand on the shoulders of all the vets and OGs who did the work before people looked at the W as more than trendy or temporary, before we saw long-term investment. People always had the tunnel fits on, but who was there to tell those stories? Back then we weren’t seen as important to popular culture. Now they see us for our trends, slang, fashion, and music. The Mecca of pop culture is basketball.

Our CBA wasn’t really any different from the NBA’s, as far as recognizing us as women. In Tulsa we didn’t have a weight room. We worked out at a Life Time Fitness and still made the playoffs twice. People were balling with no resources, playing overseas every offseason, basketball year-round. You pay homage to the ones before you, and you try to do your part to lift the league up. I’m proud to have been part of the W as a rookie, because it was a very influential period for its sustainability. Now it’s in great hands. As I gear toward the end of my career, I see real ballers, but also the game expanding its range and reach. With the new CBA, you don’t have to play overseas, and I can see people playing 20-some years and not being an outlier. Now I’m Titi and Big Mama and Auntie, but I remember how pure the essence of basketball was when I came in, and most of the women I competed against are Hall of Famers.

From Tulsa to Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, and now Chicago, your game has evolved with the times and outpaced some of your peers. How do arena atmospheres differ from building to building, and which one surprised you most?

In Tulsa, at the BOK Center, we were the hottest ticket in town. I’d never been to Oklahoma, but they were really passionate fans. Then the team was sold to Dallas, so I was on an expansion team trying to bring new fans to Arlington. People come to Arlington for the Cowboys, so it was harder to get them to UTA. But I love Dallas. It’s a sports town, and the fans embraced us. UTA felt like college, like a bowl with fans right on top of you. It only holds about 5,000, but it’s enough to fill the place and get loud.

Phoenix was amazing. I played in the bubble for Phoenix one year, and in 2021, the Olympic year, Brittney, Diana, and I went to the championship, which was insane. Their fans have been showing up since 1997, a consistent, steady base. They knew their basketball, knew their history, and honored it. A woman there still has season tickets from when I first got in the league. Seattle was crazy too, because it’s the Pacific Northwest and I’d never spent time there. Both franchises had championships, original W history, and the same star for 20 years. You recognize the same fans every year. They engage with their fans, they know basketball, and it’s the hardest to win in places like that, and in Minnesota and Las Vegas.

The one that shocked me most recently was the Valkyries. You can’t hear anything, they’re so loud, and that’s an expansion team. Our first game this year was in Portland with 20,000 people, then Golden State with 18,000. When I first got in the league, only a few places were like that consistently. Madison Square Garden and the Prudential Center were hard to fill. Now Barclays is cracking. We had a Tuesday-night game last night, cracking. With the themes, the matchups, the TV games, you can have that experience every night.

How has the business side changed most dramatically since you entered the league? The traveling, the scheduling, the production value?

The CBA raised the ceiling and raised the floor. Charter flights were a huge difference. When I came in, we had roommates at hotels and sometimes different hotels. Now you get top-of-the-line accommodations, which is very important to recovery given how much time we sp

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/09/30/athletes-pov-skylar-diggins-from-south-bend-gyms-to-the-biggest-stages-in-womens-basketball-exclusive/)._