Minneapolis South's Tayler Hill is so smooth in piling up points, not everyone sees the effort and the class behind her gaudy statistics.
Minneapolis North girls' basketball coach Faith Patterson had heard about the eighth-grader from Minneapolis South, but until the teams met in the first City Conference game of the 2004-05 season, she didn't know what to expect.
That was the day Tayler Hill exploded onto the scene. In the fourth game of her high school career, the junior high student scored 38 points in leading South to a 69-50 victory over North, which would finish that season by winning its third consecutive Class 3A championship.
"That kid literally walked through our defense like it was nothing," Patterson said last week. "It was the most incredible performance I've ever seen from an eighth-grader."