Crystal Kelly Sigwalt ‘04: Winning At Life
WNBA star and collegiate basketball coach Crystal Kelly Sigwalt ’04 has traveled the world, but her heart remains in Louisville. She’s thrilled to be back in Louisville, where she’s busy with a slam-dunk life with her husband and two small children. Her SHA friends are also happy to have Crystal back home. “I joke sometimes that it's hard for me to make new friends because I still have my core group and my support system with my friends from Sacred Heart,” Crystal laughs.
She was a King Scholar at Sacred Heart, where she felt supported in an environment where everyone wanted her to be successful. “As I've gotten older, I understand that the standards that Sacred Heart set have stuck with me and it's helped me to see things differently,” she explains. “You can have challenges or some adversity, but you have to stand up, push through it, and learn from it.”
At SHA, Crystal was a basketball phenom from 2001-2004, where she helped lead her team to three consecutive KHSAA state championships. Crystal was the 2004 Miss Kentucky Basketball and 2004 Associated Press Player of the Year, as well as the Kentucky Gatorade Player of the Year in both 2003 and 2004. She went on to star on Western Kentucky University’s women’s basketball team. She left WKU as the 12th leading scorer in NCAA Division I history, with 2,803 points and 1,258 rebounds. The Hilltoppers retired her jersey in 2008. She still owns the WKU record in more than a dozen categories.
Following graduation, Crystal was drafted to the Houston Comets in the 2008 WNBA Draft and later the Sacramento Monarchs and played in the WNBA for three seasons. She also played professionally in Spain, Italy, and Brazil. “I was very fortunate to be drafted to the WNBA and experience it for four years,” Crystal says. “That was amazing and something only a handful of people in the world get to experience. Then, I knew that I wanted to go right into coaching. These are all things I'd been talking and talking about since I was at SHA, so it just manifested itself.”
She turned her sights to coaching and built a successful coaching career over the next decade. She held coaching positions at Bellarmine University, Tennessee Tech, and Xavier. Crystal enjoyed two seasons as the associate head coach at Towson, where she helped lead the team to back-to-back 20-plus winning seasons and consecutive WNIT appearances. She was named assistant women’s basketball coach at the University of Kentucky for the 2023 season under Coach Kyra Elzy.
She’s most excited about leading “Team Kelly-Sigwalt” now, as a mom to 2-year-old Cassian and 7-month-old Zena. “I am just enjoying being a mom,” she says, “It's an exciting new chapter for me. I look back at my life and see it’s about new journeys. It’s a whole new experience that is about to be unlocked. It’s amazing and I feel refreshed.”
She never forgets the lessons she learned at SHA. “I know that high school can be a lot and, goodness, it can just seem so heavy, but these truly are some of the best times of your life,” Crystal says. “Sometimes, when you're in the thick of it, you can't see the light that is coming and the glory that's on the other side, but if you trust the process, you’ll see Sacred Heart builds strong, successful women. My SHA friends keep me humble and keep me in check. They love me enough to tell me when I'm wrong or tell me, hey, that's a great idea.”
Crystal adds, “We all come from our own experiences, but when we come together, it can be something so special. It’s the connections you make from SHA. For example, I love my friend Susan Yates Ely (SHA ’86). I broke her SHA basketball record, and now she's become a dear friend. It's just so cool to lean on these people who have gone through a similar high school experience, and we all just want each other to succeed. I'm still learning every day, but I'm so grateful to Sacred Heart. Students today must understand we're fortunate to go to Sacred Heart but also know that Sacred Heart is fortunate to have us. It’s a win all around.”