With every point she scores, Aryn Sanders raises the bar.
Signal Mountain's senior point guard - she stands perhaps 5-foot-5 - has scored 2,447 points in a high school basketball career that began when she was an eighth-grader.
That total is a school record, as is her current scoring average of 27.8 points per game.
Yet she continues to raise the bar for female athletes in numerous sports - twice selected to the Times Free Press Best of Preps volleyball team; three times a member of a state championship relay team in track; a two-time sixth-place finisher in the state pentathlon; a finalist for the Best of Preps female athlete of the year.
By the time her high school playing days are finished, Sanders will have earned a school-record 14 varsity letters that after this spring should include track and a return to softball, a sport in which she once excelled while playing in the renowned Fury program.
"She's an incredible athlete and a great person, too," said Signal Mountain assistant principal and athletic director Bumper Reese, a veteran of more than 20 years coaching high school sports.
"She is one of the fiercest competitors I've been around. You never hear her say anything about it - she's a leader by example, always hustling - but she hates to lose, and I think a lot of her teammates feed off that, too."
Sanders even got frustrated when she received a B in a math class - the only blemish on an otherwise straight-A high school record.
"It was frustrating at the time. I had a 91 or a 92, but when I signed, I figured one B might not mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things," said Sanders, who carries a 3.88 grade-point average while scoring in the low 30s on the ACT.
In November, she signed scholarship papers with the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
"Here's a great player with great grades that would probably have gotten offers from bigger programs, but she decided on Huntsville," Signal Mountain coach Kendra Bell said.
While Sanders visited schools like Bucknell and talked with Samford, Tennessee Tech, Wofford and others, Huntsville was the first to offer her a scholarship.
"If I had waited a little longer, I might've gotten other offers. There was a lot of interest," she said. "I really connected, though, with the (Huntsville) coach. She was an assistant at Samford when I went to a camp there. When she moved, I guess I was on her list of potential recruits."
That coach, Andrea Lemmond, is getting a complete package.
"I have a guard that can cover most anybody, but Sanders just blew by her," Grundy County coach Jonathon Shedd said. "I've seen several triple-A players, and I haven't seen anybody as fast as her. She's so quick and she's so athletic. Those types of kids are very rare."
Sanders, whose first love is probably press-breaking, can be a prolific 3-point shooter when necessary. She has worked hard to transition from a quick-step-drive-to-the-basket player into a complete ball-handling shooter, and she has used her basketball IQ to become a capable rebounder.
"I love to break the press," she said. "I like dribbling, racing downcourt, putting up the 3s, but I like to beat the press. That's just me being a point guard. I like the challenge, getting to prove my skills."
Yet Bell, who has college coaching experience, views her prized shooter as a complete player.
"Defensively, she can cover a lot of ground. She anticipates so well," the coach said. "I'm still amazed that she can steal a ball going to her right, stop on a dime and change directions. Offensively, she still gets to the rim a lot, but she can drive and step back where there's six to eight feet between her and a defender because of her quickness.
"Nobody I have coached comes close to her high school-wise, and I only had a couple at Chattanooga State that would've come close. She's the complete package."
Contact Ward Gossett at wgossett@timesfreepress.com or 423-886-4765. Follow him on Twitter @wardgossett.