As Tenleigh Smith signed her letter of intent to Idaho State, she looked around at the people gathered in the foyer at Century High School.

There was her family, her teammates and coaches, her friends, the new community she’d built at Century after transferring from Blackfoot. But one face stood out more than the others.

Maylee Shuler is Century head coach Chris Shuler’s daughter. She’s 9 years old and loves basketball. Before Century’s games this year, she made posters with Tenleigh’s name and number and displayed them proudly in the stands.

Maylee wants to grow up to be just like her hero. And even if she didn’t quite realize the importance of Tenleigh’s signing, Tenleigh was thinking about it as she signed the paper in front of her.

For all of Idaho State’s success as a women’s basketball program, the Bengals don’t really recruit locally. Their 2020-21 Big Sky championship team didn’t have a player from Idaho after Rigby’s Kaitlyn Bell transferred midway through the 2019-20 season.

The last ISU player to come from District 5 was American Falls’ Lindsey Woodworth, who played one year for the Bengals in 2014-15. That was also the last year that the team had multiple players from Idaho on the roster.

Growing up and playing for the local college — particularly if the team is as successful as the ISU women — is every young athlete’s dream.

It’s a dream that started for Smith when she was 4 years old, running around the court at Reed Gym while serving as a ballgirl for the Bengals. It’s a dream that she chased through years of hard workouts, countless drills run by her mother, Courtnie Smith, who’s now an assistant at ISU.

Basketball — and especially ISU basketball — is practically in Tenleigh Smith’s blood, and it’s always seemed to be part of her destiny. From those early days as a ballgirl, the girl and the program have orbited each other, mirror images of consistent success as Tenleigh became one of the best players in Idaho and the Bengals became one of the best programs in the Big Sky Conference.

As she signed the letter that confirmed that destiny, Tenleigh didn’t just think of her dreams. Instead, she thought of the dreams of girls like Maylee Shuler, looking up at her with stars in their eyes, just as she had once looked up at Idaho State players like Chelsea Pickering and Kaela Oakes.

And as she fulfilled her dream by putting pen to paper, Tenleigh thought about the dreams of girls like Maylee Shuler, and how she’d made those dreams just a little more achievable, the path a little bit easier to follow.

“It’s kind of a little bit of pressure to be that role model for kids, because they’ve seen you grow up in high school, and then you go into this big college program,” Smith said. “They’re like, ‘I want to do that, that’s so awesome.’

“So being that role model, I feel amazing.”

***

When Tenleigh Smith decided that she wanted to try volleyball for the first time last fall, Century coach Breanne Robinson was mostly just excited about adding a supreme athlete to her roster.

On the basketball court, Smith fits all the stereotypes of a coaches’ daughter, which of course she is. One year, Courtnie dragged Tenleigh and her younger sister Taylor halfway across the country to one of Pat Summitt’s final camps in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Courtnie ran Tenleigh and Taylor through countless workouts, coached them on AUU teams and for the first three years of Tenleigh’s high school career at Blackfoot.

Tenleigh became fundamentally sound and strongly self-disciplined, which is easy to see on the court. The enduring image of watching a Century game this year was her bringing the ball up the court, eyes up and ball on a string, looking like an image out of a how-to book.

But Smith is also a devastating athlete, one of the fastest sprinters in the area. Her speed shrinks the court, gets her onto defenders and initiating the offense before the opposing team can react.

“Her speed is phenomenal, you know, probably one of the fastest girls I’ve ever coached,” Chris Shuler said. “And then just her court awareness, the way that she sees the ball and can push the ball. Those were probably the the main things that I noticed right off the bat.”

It was the combination of the hard-earned skill and the natural athleticism that made her a star from the moment she first stepped on the court. She was named the Journal’s Freshman of the Year in her first year at Blackfoot, and made the All-Area team each of the next two years. That track record got Robinson excited, even though she knew Smith had never played volleyball before — but there was also a small twinge of worry.

After all, Robinson knew that Smith had never been anything less than a star. For almost all of her basketball career, she’d been the best player on the court, the one her teams were built around, the one who always got the ball.

How would she react, Robinson wondered, when that wasn’t the case anymore?

“She wasn’t in the game the whole time, which is probably a different experience for her,” Robinson said. “She did great, you know, she was always supportive and she was recognizing teammates and supporting them from the bench, which I feel is a super-valuable thing as an athlete. You know, learning how to still be a leader, even if you’re on the bench.”

Smith is under no illusions that she’ll walk into ISU’s lineup and play right away. The Bengals’ starting guards, Dora Goles and Diaba Konate, both made all-conference last year and are coming back in 2021-22. Smith played against high-level competition at AAU tournaments, but with head coach Seton Sobolewski’s staff recruiting internationally, they’re drawing from an even bigger pool of players.

The competition for playing time will be tougher than on any team she’s been on, and it’s likely that for at least a couple years, her role won’t be as the ball-dominating, team-running point guard she’s been her whole life.

Instead, it’ll be clapping from the bench, picking her teammates up with words of encouragement instead of pinpoint passes — and if she succeeds in that role, it’ll be because of what she learned on Century’s volleyball court.

“I’ve never played volleyball my entire life,” Smith said. “It frustrated me, because every sport I’ve done, I’m so competitive, and I want to win that I just do well. My dad told me, hey, you’re gonna have to get used to not being the best. And he explained, you know, when you go to ISU, you’re not just going to go in there and start.

“Playing volleyball helped me figure out that role, because I was on the bench. It helped me learn different tools that I’ve never had to exercise. I never realized how much I appreciate people that would always communicate like, hey, you’re doing good, you’re doing fine. That is such a big role to fill, and it’s a hard one.”

***

For a little while after Idaho State offered her last summer, Smith wanted to wait and see what other opportunities would come in.

Then right after school started up again in September, she started talking with her dad on the drive to Century one morning.

They talked about the opportunity to play at home, in front of her family, with her mom as one of the assistant coaches.

They talked the culture that Sobolewski has built at Idaho State, the rare opportunity to be part of a program that’s been consistently successful and is likely to remain so.

By the time they got to school, Tenleigh knew where she wanted to go.

She called Sobolewski to verbally commit, kicking off a celebration in the ISU basketball offices.

When Courtnie Smith poked her head into Sobolewski’s office to see what he was so fired up about, the rest of the staff looked at her like she’d just grown a second head.

Well, we just got a verbal commit.

Who?

Your daughter.

“She was like, ‘I didn’t even know,’” Tenleigh said. “The reason I didn’t tell her is because I want it to be my own decision. I didn’t want her to feel like she was pressuring or anything like that. But that was pretty funny.”

That’s the least of the pressure Tenleigh will deal with at Idaho State. She’ll be trying to break into a stacked team, trying to adapt to a reduced role. Trying to balance all that with her studies — accounting or marketing or maybe she wants to be a pediatrician, she hasn’t decided.

She’ll still have the pressure of being a role model for kids like Maylee Shuler, too. They’ve seen her sign, open up a path that hasn’t seemed possible for girls from around here for a long time. Now they want to see her succeed.

“Finally, we have a local kid that signs (at ISU), so I was ecstatic,” Chris Shuler said. “I was extremely excited for Tenleigh, and then, also for ISU so that we have a local kid we can go watch. That’s a huge example, too. I’m saying, you know, if you work hard, put in the work, you can play locally here at Idaho State, at a DI school. But Tenleigh’s leading by example, and the younger kids can definitely see that.”

ISU Adds California Guard Paisley Specht

Along with Smith, ISU women's basketball announced the signing of guard Paisley Specht in the class of 2021 last week.

Specht, a 5-foot-11 guard from Granite Bay High School in Folsom, California, averaged 14 points, nine rebounds and four assists per game in high school.

She was first-team all-conference as a senior.

"Paisley is a tall and athletic guard that is multi-dimensional. She is also an exceptional student," Sobolewski said.

Smith and Specht are the fifth and sixth members of ISU's 2021-22 signing class to be officially announced, joining Australian forwards Brooke Malone and Kayla Salmons, California guard Sophia Covello and Washington post player Mia Flor.

Specht announced her commitment to ISU in October 2020.

She'll be the fourth Californian on the roster for the 2021-22 season, joining guards Jordan Sweeney, Finley Garnett and Covello.