Dayeesha Hollins did it in high school, too.

She was a sophomore playing for Winton Woods High School in Cincinnati in a district championship game. She drove out on the fast break and felt the pressure of post players behind her. Hollins stopped at the 3-point line, jumped and felt a defender bump her.

She tossed up the shot overhand, which banked of the backboard and in.

“Everybody was going crazy,” Hollins said. “I lost it for a minute. Not lost it, but in shock.”

Hollins, a freshman guard on the Michigan women’s basketball team and acrobatic as ever, is averaging 12 points a game for the Wolverines, who play host to Kent State at 7 p.m. Friday in the first round of the WNIT.

Hollins plays at a fast pace, often making a layup between two defenders then darting down the floor to be the first player back on defense.

Hollins’ favorite move, freshman guard Jenny Ryan said, comes on the baseline. She’ll drive, cut back into the lane and, feeling taller players around, she’ll wrap her body around them, hang in the air, get fouled and make the shot by throwing the ball over her shoulder.

At 5-foot-6 and rail thin, the art of the creative shot was something Hollins worked at from the time she started playing AAU basketball in seventh grade. The first time a crazy shot worked, she considered it an anomaly. Then, it started to do it more often.

So even though she looks out of control, she agreed with this assessment of her game: controlled wildness.

“She’s creative and she’s crafty,” Ryan said. “Sometimes she makes it and you laugh because it’s like, ‘That’s just Day.’ You can’t really explain it. They go in and she draws fouls because of it, and I can’t really say. That’s part of her game, and it seems to work out fine for us so far.

“Sometimes you see her doing all this awkward, her body is all over the place, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ And she makes it.”

Hollins wasn’t sure, though, if her style of play would translate to college basketball, where players are bigger, more skilled and knowledgeable. So she started working on a more traditional style, taking more pull-up jump shots and “regular, normal shots.”

When she arrived in Ann Arbor last summer, the freshman saw almost immediately that fixing her game would be unnecessary. If anything, she’s thrived.

She is third on the team in scoring and leads Michigan (17-13) with 93 assists. Despite her seemingly out-of-control play, she’s shooting 42 percent from the field, got to the free-throw line 117 times and made 39 percent of her 3-pointers.

And she’s done all of it without what was one of her biggest concerns coming in - putting on weight.

“I had thought about it,” Hollins said. “Like, ‘Man, I don’t want to have to gain.’ I thought they’d have to make me gain 10 or 15 pounds. They didn’t, and I’m really excited about that.

“I just thought I was going to turn into a man or something, so muscular.”

Michigan coach Kevin Borseth is fine with what Hollins brought. She’s held up well in the Big Ten, averaging 11.4 points a game in conference play.

And her skill and speed - Ryan says that’s what stood out to her at first - is what attracted Borseth to Hollins. The craziest part - Borseth thinks she Hollins has a lot of room to grow.

“I don’t think she’s really anywhere near arriving what she’s capable of arriving at,” Borseth said. “I don’t know that she was comfortable enough to do the things that she wanted to be able to do freely.

“… The more comfortable she gets, the better she’s going to be because she belongs. She belongs at this level.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball at AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.