Diggins arrived with the mask at her major testing grounds in June - first in the altitude at USA Basketball's Youth Development Festival in Colorado Springs, Colo., then back at sea level for the Nike Skills Academy. She said her mission at both was to prove herself. To everyone else, but to herself as well.

So the mask is a necessity. Diggins calls it her "Game Face." The rising junior from South Bend, Ind., often wears it even if there isn't a game.

"She is intense," says her mother, Renee Scott, "in everything."

"The game is not over," says her step father, Maurice Scott, "until she wins. Then it's over immediately."

Skylar Diggins at USA Basketball

When the parental assessments are recounted, Diggins allows herself a smile. Then she immediately agrees.

"If I can't win," she says, "I can't play."

Skylar Diggins plays basketball. And since she plays it, of course she plays it well - and wins. This past high-school season, the 5-foot-9 lefty averaged 24.4 points, 6.1 assists, 4.9 rebounds and 4.7 steals, as a sophomore, and led Washington High School to a 28-1 record and Indiana state championship. She'd left an unmistakeable calling card during her freshman season, scoring 43 points during an 87-65 victory over St. Joseph's, which had been the defending 3A state champs and had won its previous 25 games.

By the end of this summer, Diggins was one of the club circuit's best players and led her height-deprived team, The Family, to the quarterfinals of Nike Nationals. She began the prestigious event by engineering a flogging of DFW Elite Gold, which went on to reach the championship game. Diggins' encore to the DFW game was a 25-point performance during a victory that night over the Cal Storm.

Diggins has made a contest out of everything else in her life, including school, where she ranks about sixth in a class of approximately 385 with a grade-point average of 3.86 in a medical-magnet program. How basketball came to best slake her thirst for competition really is no mystery. She almost literally grew up in a gym. Her father, Tige Diggins played basketball, as did her step father, Maurice Scott, who runs the Martin Luther King Community Center, coached Diggins' club teams since she was 10 and is an assistant for the Washington girl's varsity basketball team. Moreover, Diggins lives five minutes away from Notre Dame, whose courts have graced her talents and endured her self-wrath.

Playing such a big role in his step daughter's athletic life was almost another of several comical turns for Scott. One of his claims to fame was heeding his high-school coach's admonition to try taking a charge from future NBA star Shawn Kemp. Like many who would follow, Scott wound up getting posterized by a Kemp dunk - a highlight (or lowlight, depending on one's perspective) that was played time and time again on "Hooiser Highlights." Scott nevertheless stayed with the game, coaching the Indiana Soliders boy's club team to the semifinals at the prestigious Big Time tournament in Las Vegas, but then having to tell his players that he was leaving them to coach 10-year-old girls.

Skylar Diggins throws a no-look lob

One of those 10-year-olds, Diggins, had been playing with boys for years and revealed an extraordinary talent for hoops. Diggins says playing with boys taught her to like the "rough" side of basketball. "I wanted a contact sport," she says, "and I liked being in the dirt." That whole period in her life is fused into Diggins' game today, as she plays a style that can be best described as "tough." To wit, while lacking some of the size and muscular armor of other players of her ilk, Diggins is a fearless penetrator, well-versed in finishing amid traffic and contact.

Nevertheless, Diggins' mother, Renee Scott, wasn't completely onboard with the whole basketball thing. After Diggins fell and suffered a cut at the community center, Scott vowed she would not be allowed to go back. Diggins defied her mother and went back the next day, then proceeded to turn down every option, from ballet to gymnastics to cheerleading, that Renee Scott placed in front of her.

Diggins has an inclination to choose activities that yield benefits to her main pursuits in life and she had no time for her mother's alternatives. Soccer, she rejected because "I just reached down and picked up the ball," she says. "I just couldn't help myself." She plays volleyball because, like basketball, it involves jumping and quick movement. She also has played softball because of the running, catching and following through.

Even deejaying - arguably Diggins' favorite off-court pursuit - has, in her mind, a side benefit to basketball.

"It has a lot in common with basketball because it's all about the rhythm," Diggins says. "It's about rhythm and finding a beat. It's the same with basketball."

Deejaying, in hip-hop culture, is a complex art of manipulating music from two turntables, in turn creating a new piece of music by mixing, sampling and scratching, among other methods. Diggins caught the bug from Maurice Scott, who says his step-daughter is a "great" deejay. "Anyone can get up and spin records, but can they move a crowd?" he asks. "Skylar can, and I can see how she relates it to basketball because it's about communication."

On and off a basketball court, Diggins is an organizer. At the Youth Development Festival, coaches put the ball in her hands, and it clicked in her mind - and the mind of others - that the scorer-deluxe actually may be better suited to play point guard. There, her organizational skills and athletic abilities mesh. The possibility unleashed a flood of information Diggins felt necessary to acquire. It was not uncommon, both in Colorado Springs and Beaverton, to see Diggins pull a coach aside for more detailed explanations of everything from drills to offensive sets.

Skylar Diggins

"It's like math class," Diggins explains. "You don't ask the teacher to put No. 7 on the blackboard because that's the problem I got right. You want to put the teacher to put the problem you got wrong on the board. How else are you going to get better? I'm never ashamed or embarrassed to ask a question."

It is a reflex for Diggins to size up every situation she encounters, but whether she eventually classifies herself as a point guard is open to question. James Meriweather, the director of The Family, an Indianapolis-based club team that is among the most longstanding and prestigious in the country, calls Diggins a "miniature Magic" (after do-everything, former Laker guard Magic Johnson) who defies categories. "Basketball IQ is her biggest asset," he says. "She operates 2-3 plays ahead of everyone else. Skylar is what I call a basketball player."

Where Diggins will take her rare talents is another open question, a situation that is not surprising given her circumspect nature. She says she has more than a dozen schools under consideration at any one time and that the schools change frequently, a fact her mother confirms. Because of proximity, Notre Dame, Purdue and Indiana are thought to be in the mix, and the usual suspects - the UConns and Tennessees - also are believed to be hot on her trail.

In the meantime, Diggins continues her pursuit of perfection with almost grim determination. The mask, after all, facilitates more open exploration, the lack thereof which stifles many girl basketball players. Diggins also is extremely hard on herself, giving the impression that the bar she sets for herself is not a static one but in constant, perhaps unstoppable motion. A music buff, Diggins can relate to the song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards penned more than 40 years ago for the Rolling Stone - "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."

"There is a time to play and there is a time to be serious," Diggins says. "When it comes down to the game of basketball, I'm about learning news skills and being the best I can be. Winning is fun. You can tell who wants it the most by the look in their eyes. People, they try to break you. We're all trying to compete on a level of greatness. That's why I always feel that I have to outwork someone, everyone. It's like you are trying to prove yourself ... to yourself. Can I compete with the best? Can I be the best?"

In her unrelenting quest to find answers, Skylar Diggins straps on her Game Face daily. It is a mask that conveys perfectly her intent, yet hides all insecurities and therefore unleashes the intensity necessary to wage war against the evil spirits that lurk within and without. So far, it is a battle Diggins appears to be winning.

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