Hannah Hidalgo remembers the first time she saw Olivia Miles play. She was in elementary school and Miles, who was in eighth grade, had already started making a name for herself as a young standout point guard out of Phillipsburg, NJ, with a unique style of play and competitiveness.
“She was just killing it,” Hidalgo tells us in January, while on the set of their SLAM cover shoot, the first time Notre Dame has ever been on the cover. “It was just this little girl with goggles and a puff [hairstyle]. She started with the puff. She was just running up and down, killing our girls. I was like, Yo, this girl is tough.i> And to find out it was the Olivia Miles.”
Miles had also caught the attention of none other than Niele Ivey, too. Now in her fifth year as head coach at Notre Dame after 12 years as an assistant and associate head coach, Ivey saw an undeniable talent. “When she stepped on the floor, oh my gosh, she completely separated herself,” Ivey told USA Today in 2022. “How fast she was with the ball, the way she gets downhill, what an elite finisher she is. She reminded me of an NBA player with her skill set.”
And it was Ivey’s vision back then that would set the stage for the future of the Irish program. But it all started in Jersey. Miles went on to become a star at Blair Academy, averaging close to a triple-double as a junior with 13.6 points, 8.1 rebounds and 7.6 assists and winning a Prep A state championship in 2020. As a five-star recruit and the No. 8 ranked player in the class of 2020 (as well as the No. 2 point guard in the nation), she committed to the Irish as the first-ever early enrollee and, alongside Sonia Citron, was part of Ivey’s first-ever recruiting class.
Meanwhile, that same elementary school girl who once watched Miles compete would go on to become a true point guard herself. Hidalgo, from Merchantville, NJ, was a star at Paul VI, where she was coached by her pops, Orlando, and averaged 21.5 points, 4.7 rebounds and 5.4 steals per game through her three years there. The No. 5 player in the class of 2023, Hidalgo has always been a force to be reckoned with. We had a front row seat to the HH Show at the end of summer 2022 at the SLAM Summer Classic when she hit an eastbay layup that had Rucker Park in awe. She committed to play for Notre Dame in 2022, when Miles was just a sophomore.
Miles was already familiar with Hidalgo’s game when they both arrived on campus in Notre Dame, IN, ahead of the 2023-24 season. She remembers the first time she saw Hidalgo play, on the AAU circuit. “She was playing JuJu [Watkins] and Jada [Williams], I believe, and she was playing for my old AAU team, The Rise. She was just cooking them. And I was like, Yo, who is this girl laying girls and then screaming at them? After I was like, There's no way. I've never seen this type of energy before.”
Who could have imagined what would happen next? Hidalgo’s breakout year as a freshman. Miles bouncing back from tearing her ACL, having missed an entire season, only to not miss a beat. While there was plenty of skepticism about whether Miles and Hidalgo, two guards, could play together, that’s definitely not the case now. Together, they’re shocking the world as the most electric and dominant backcourt in the country.
It’s a scary sight for opponents, who first have to scout how to guard them individually, with Liv’s otherworldly court vision and craftiness and Hidalgo’s fiery competitiveness that makes her both a lethal scorer and defender. And then there’s the ultimate threat of what happens when they’re on the floor at the same time, which includes combined averages of 42.1 points, 12.2 rebounds, 10.9 assists and 5.6 steals per game.
“I feel like you kind of just have to choose one to stop if you can, and then the other one will kind of do damage, or even Soni will do damage. It's kind of like, pick your poison. Which one do you want to give up? Who do you want to let go off? It's tough,” Miles says, while sitting alongside Hidalgo inside the team’s practice facility.
It’s at this point in the interview that we know we’ve got the perfect way to describe the Irish right now.
“Pick your poison” not only applies to Liv and Hannah as a dynamic duo; it’s the entire team’s motto. Equipped with standouts like Citron, Liatu King and freshman Kate Koval (to name a few), the Irish are really, really tough to beat. Just ask USC and UConn. At the time we go to press, Notre Dame is ranked No. 3 in the AP poll.
“If I score 15 this half, I can expect Liv to come out and she's gonna start knocking down threes,” Hidalgo says. “Now she's gonna have 15 or 16 this half and even Soni throwing in points, too. And Soni will have, like, 30, and you won't even know it. So again, just pick your poison. We have so much firepower, especially with the guard play, and that's not even talking about the bigs who can pop and shoot and stuff like that.”
Notre Dame’s resurgence this season is the work of a visionary. No one—let us repeat, no one—knows the program better than Ivey, a former point guard who led the Irish to their first-ever championship back in ’01. When it comes to the rhythm of their offense, Ivey saw an opportunity in her PG prodigies to instill a “next-play mentality” from Day 1. On any given possession, Hidalgo and Miles have a knack for doing things no one has ever seen, such as in their very first game together against Loyola Marymount. Up by 33 points in the third quarter, Miles dished out a silky smooth between-the-legs pass to Hidalgo, who, on the very next play, after diving to the floor for a steal, sent a behind-the-back pass straight into the hands of King for an easy layup.
“They’re the extension of me on the court,” Ivey said during media day. “I have a lot of confidence and trust in both of them to make sure that we run the right plays and do a great job of facilitating the offense. We have a talented team. It's something I say a lot, but Liv with the experience she has and Hannah with the experience that she had last year, you're looking at two of the best in the business when it comes to running the point.”
With the 11-game (and counting) winning streak they’re on as of late January, the Irish are on pace to have their best winning percentage (currently .882) since the 2018-19 season, when they made it to the NCAA title game after winning it all the year before. For Miles, this has always been the goal from the moment she arrived.
“I think Sonia and I both came to this school wanting to bring them back to the top,” she says. “They had a few down years, and our goal was to bring Notre Dame to the national championship.”
Miles made an immediate impact her first year, solidifying her role as the starting PG (she was the first freshman to start at point in the season opener since Lindsay Allen in 2013). With time, Miles was scoring in double figures and recording double-double performances that put her in the company of future WNBA All-Stars. Her 21 points and 11 assists against Pitt on Dec. 19 made her just the fourth Irish player ever to have a 20+ point, 10+ assist double-double. The other players to do so? Skylar Diggins-Smith, Marina Mabrey and Jackie Young. But really, Miles was just getting started. In her NCAA Tournament debut, she became the first men’s or women’s player in tourney history to record a triple-double as a freshman with a 12/11/11 stat line. It was the stuff of a legend in the making.
Right as Miles was continuing to make a statement as a sophomore, the unthinkable happened: she tore her ACL in the last regular-season game against Louisville. The injury caused her to miss her entire junior year. What she missed most during the time she spent rehabbing were the emotions she felt when she was on the court. It was then that she set out on a mission to prove to herself, most importantly, that she could bounce back. “[I wanted to] prove to myself that I can do something hard and push through adversity and overcome such a challenge that not a lot of people could have done,” she says.
In her return this season, Miles has left everyone in awe: not only is she still the competitive, dominant force she was before, she’s putting up career-high numbers—she’s currently averaging 16.4 ppg on 53.4 percent shooting from the field—and has added a much more efficient three-point shot to her bag, too. “I think it's just my confidence,” Miles says, when asked what’s been the biggest factor in her improvement from the three-point line. “I credit that a lot to my injury, just knowing that, like I said, it's not that serious if you miss a shot. As basketball players, we beat ourselves up for every mistake we make. So I've kind of learned to adjust when I'm missing shots, and that's helped me to not miss more shots and have faith that I'll hit the next one and just change that mindset for me.”
Miles is a true basketball savant, someone who admits she doesn’t have a specific approach when it comes to her style of play, but instead sees the court as her canvas. “I see basketball as art,” she says. “I think I have a canvas, and I'm able to be the artist and use my creativity in ways that you don't really see very often. Hannah does a little bit of the same. We have such great, great players on our team that also have great vision. So, it's just fun to play with people who can find you and be creative with the game, instead of just, like, pass, shoot, layup. We like to make it fun instead of so fundamental all the time.”
Hannah describes Miles’ game as “clutch and flashy,” but it’s fair to say we haven’t seen Miles at her most creative just yet. She reveals that she doesn’t even feel fully back, which is to be expected from someone who was on the sidelines for a year. How exactly will she know when she’s her full self again on the court? “Not being sore mid-game or, like, wanting to die in the fourth quarter. That's definitely a start,” she says. “I think making it through a full game is very difficult, and anyone coming back from an injury knows that. I think there are levels to this, and I'm barely even halfway through the season yet, so I'm just giving myself grace. I'm trusting I'll be back in due time.”
The year Miles was out was the same year Hidalgo arrived. To hold your own as a freshman is one thing, but to be tasked with leading the team and bringing energy back to the program with its star out? That takes someone on an entirely different wavelength.
The good news for the Irish is that Hannah is an entity. As a force of nature, Hidalgo wasn’t afraid of the moment. She owned it. “I think coming into college, I [knew] it was gonna be a lot, especially with Liv going down,” she says. “It was gonna be a lot of taking on such a dominant team, such a strong team and just leading that team as a freshman. Coach Ivey, she had instilled a lot of trust in me before I even got here. She had told me she was giving me the keys and it was going to be a lot, but she knew what it was and knew who I was, and she had trusted me a lot.”
During training and workouts in the summer leading up to this season, Liv took on the role of mentor with Hidalgo. She’d bring Hannah to their 6:00 a.m. team workouts and lifts and, most notably, helped her prepare her for what was ahead. “Being a freshman, not knowing anybody, having Liv there to say, You can't get this person the ball when they're running here, they're not gonna be able to catch it. Or, Sonia likes the ball in this spot. This is what this player likes. This is how you should look for this player. It was really helpful.”
All the while, Miles knew that in many ways, Hidalgo also had to just go out there and figure things out. “I definitely let Hannah kind of figure it out, learn on her own,” Miles tells us, adding: “I've been in her shoes before she was here, but it was just incredible to kind of see what she did in that rookie year—leading such a powerful team, as she said, and figuring it out along the way.”
And she definitely did. With unmatched speed and versatility on both ends of the floor, Hidalgo put the college basketball world on notice with her all-around game. She packed the stat sheet with numbers no one had ever seen before: from numerous 30-pieces, including against UConn and Georgia Tech, to program single-season records of 22.6 points and 4.6 steals per game (the latter of which also led the nation). That season, she totaled 160 steals, which broke a program record previously set by none other than Diggins-Smith. Speaking of which: “She just got it here [pointing to her heart],” Sky said recently about Hannah while on Angel Reese’s podcast, Unapologetically Angel. “Just fearless, can play both sides of the basketball, cares about both sides of the basketball. That’s not always the case.”
Reese clearly agreed: “A killer.”
Miles has used—and tweeted—the word “menace” to describe Hidalgo’s game. She plays in a way that is so unafraid, it really doesn’t matter who she’s guarding or who is guarding her. HH is going to get a bucket (or a steal) every single time.
“It’s just the most insane energy plays,” Miles says. “In that tweet, I said, I just be laughing. I'm at half-court—like, check the videos. I just laugh, because it's just funny what she does to people and just in her cute little, like, uppity self, she just runs around and then gets back on defense right away. Just so unassuming. That’s just such a menace to me. You get fired up.”
While everyone sees greatness in her, what matters most is that Hidalgo sees it in herself. She’s taken her game to a completely different level in her sophomore season, currently averaging 25.7 points on 50.4 percent shooting from the field. She ranks second in the country in points per game. “I think the most lethal part [of my game] is my ability to score over bigger defenders, and my defense, of course,” she says.
“Duh,” Liv chimes in.
“Defense is like a lost art in and of itself. Not a lot of people want to play both sides of the ball,” Hidalgo continues.
They’re both artists in their own ways, unique and creative. But what happens on the court when they’re together is the result of pure collaboration. Their reads to each other seem to be connected by an invisible string, like when Olivia sent a full-court hail mary pass to Hidalgo against Wake Forest, or the time Hidalgo dished out a behind-her-head pass to Miles for a fastbreak layup. It’s crazy to think that this is only their first year playing together.
“It's hard to describe,” Miles says, when asked about their style of play together. “It just happens.” To which Hidalgo adds: “I think it's just two top guards reading each other. When you're playing with another great guard, it's something that you would do also. You're ready for it. You're expecting it, compared to, like, a big who might not have played with another top guard.”
As for what happens next, only time will tell. Miles has yet to announce whether she’ll declare for the 2025 WNBA Draft or return to Notre Dame next year, but that’s neither here nor there. What the Irish are focused on right now is winning it all.
“The job is just starting, it's not finished yet,” Miles says. “Consistency is the biggest statement we can make. We've struggled with that in years prior, going out early in the tournament, not when we should have, losing to teams that we probably shouldn't have as well. Just being consistent and bringing our same identity every day is a statement for us.”
Adds Hannah: “This year is the time to take it all the way and win it all.”
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