Michelle Smith: 'Fearless' Tyi Skinner setting the tone for Arizona State women's basketball

Tyi Skinner has played against teams with size before. But when she took the court last weekend for Arizona State’s road matchup against No. 2 Stanford, she looked up, and then up again and then up again.

“Everybody looks big to me,” joked the 5-foot-5 guard from Washington D.C. “The thing is, they are so long and lanky. I was standing beside them thinking ‘Dang, you all really are big.’ But they still have to guard me and I was going to try to use that to my advantage.”

That is the essence of Skinner right there. Funny, confident and …

“Fearless,” said Sun Devils first-year coach Natasha Adair, who brought Skinner with her from Delaware to Tempe to take a leading role in her new ASU offense and to set a tone.

“Her moxie is contagious,” Adair said. “Her teammates respect that about her. She is really the only one that knows me. She was going to have to go to her new teammates and learn them and speak their language and that can be intimidating, but I’m really proud of how well she’s done. She is a leader for this team.”

Skinner has made a stellar first impression on the Pac-12, ranking second in the league in scoring at 20.4 points a game. She’s had eight games of at least 20 points so far this season, including 26 points in her first Pac-12 game against rival Arizona in Tucson and 20 points (including four 3-pointers) against the vaunted Cardinal. She was right. They did have to guard her. And for a team that lost a large percentage of its scoring from last season, it’s been a welcome shot of offense.

Skinner, who is also second on the Sun Devils in assists, was not highly recruited out of high school. Adair wanted her. And she wanted to go where she was wanted. Skinner has wanted to play professional basketball since before she started school.

“With where I’m from and everything I’ve been through - I’ve been playing since I was two or three years old - this is what I knew I wanted to do in life,” Skinner said. “That’s why I have no doubts. There’s nothing to be scared about. You have to be confident in something.”

When Adair made the move to Arizona State there was little doubt Skinner, who averaged 12.8 points a game last season for a team that reached the NCAA Tournament, would go with her, even as she was contacted by other teams.

“I didn’t have a big role last year (at Delaware) on a team with six seniors. I wanted a chance to play for her here. My coach is here,” Skinner said. “She is setting me up to where I want to be in the future. I want to play professionally and I thought playing in the best conference in the country would help me.”

Skinner laughed at the idea that she is the Natasha Adair decoder ring for the rest of her team.

“It’s easy, and sometimes it’s funny,” Skinner said. “People are always asking me ‘What does coach want us to do?’ and “Do you know what she said?’ I do a lot of explaining. Sometimes I have to tell them what she meant, even if that's not what she said.”

Skinner doesn’t feel like she is part of a rebuild, despite the fact that Adair is taking over for a coach in Charli Turner Thorne that was with the program for 25 years.

She wants to win now.

“We’ve had injuries and that’s not an excuse, but we are working on gelling together,” Skinner said. “We need to figure out our chemistry and how to win together. But I feel good about this team.

“I just want to play as well as I can in order for us to win. And people are going to have to guard me and if they do, other people will get the chance to go off. We are going to need that.”