Alabama High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Reece Davis winning twice in two weeks tells you

Start with the confirmed result. Reece Davis of Deshler won the Alabama Girls Basketball Player of the Week for the period covering January 5–11, 2025: 30 points on 58% shooting in one game, 27 points on 52% shooting in the next. Then she showed up on the very next ballot — the January 21 poll — alongside seven different nominees competing for the same award.

That sequence is worth unpacking. SI's Alabama editors put her back in the field the following week because her play kept earning it. But for anyone trying to understand how this poll works, the more important data point is the January 14 nominee list itself. Eight players. Stat lines ranging from Samarian Franklin's 40-point, 61%-FG, 10-assist line for Wenonah all the way to Hadlee Sanderson's three-game stretch of 35 total rebounds for Brilliant. A Mississippi State commit (Lani Smallwood, Susan Moore) posting 45 points and 24 rebounds over two games. And Reece Davis won.

She won because Deshler's community turned out. The stat lines do not determine the winner here — they determine the nominees. What happens after the article goes live is entirely about which school's supporters find the link, share it, and keep voting through Sunday night. Davis's numbers were strong but not the highest on the ballot. That is not an asterisk; that is the design of a fan vote.

The January 14 field: eight schools, what the numbers actually said

The 2025 poll covering games January 5–11 is the richest confirmed ballot on record for this award. Eight nominees, eight different schools, and stat lines detailed enough to compare properly:

Look at what the table does not tell you: which school is in which AHSAA classification, and whether that matters here. It does not. Queen Ballard's 31-rebound game for Central of Coosa County — a small program in Rockford — sits next to Lani Smallwood's 45-point outing for Susan Moore. Both earned nominations. On a fan ballot, a school in a small county competing against a Mississippi State commit's program is not an upset waiting to happen — it is Wednesday through Sunday, depending on which community moves faster.

Sarah Davis's raw numbers might look like the week's standout (39 points, 18 rebounds, and 8 blocks in a single game is unusual by any measure), but Davis did not win. The ballot is not a stat-sorting exercise. Knowing that is the single most useful thing before you plan a campaign around any nominee in this field.

How the vote cap works — and why it matters more here than in other polls

The organizer's published language for this poll: "You can vote as often as you wish and are encouraged to share our polls with others." That is worth stating once, precisely, because it is different from what you might assume if you have seen Alabama's multi-sport Athlete of the Week poll. That poll limits voting to one per 6 hours per device — an explicit cap, stated verbatim. This girls basketball poll has no such limit.

The practical consequence is that a supporter who comes back to the article five times between Thursday and Sunday is casting five real votes, not getting blocked or throttled. Sharing the link into a group chat where 40 people each vote a few times across the week is more effective than any one person grinding through the same phone. The ballot rewards breadth — how many people you reach — over any single voter's persistence.

And the close time is Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The last push Sunday afternoon and evening, when many people have already assumed the week is over, runs into a field where casual voting has thinned out. That window has decided close polls before in this format.

The Alabama girls basketball programs that show up — and why

Spring Garden, in Cherokee County, has won three consecutive AHSAA state championships and produced Ace Austin, an Alabama signee. That program's name does not appear in the two confirmed January 2025 polls. Neither does Mountain Brook, which holds 35 all-time girls basketball titles in Alabama — more than any other program in the state. What that tells you is that the SI ballot tracks recent weekly performance, not program reputation. A school with 35 titles can be absent from a given week's list if it did not have the loudest stat line that week.

The schools that do appear are spread across the state in ways the football polls rarely are. Shoals Christian is in the Muscle Shoals area in the northwest. Brilliant is in Marion County. Wenonah draws from Birmingham. Central of Coosa County is in Rockford, a town of about 800 people. Deshler — whose Reece Davis won — is in Tuscumbia, in the Tennessee Valley, in a community where girls basketball has been consistent enough to produce back-to-back nominations for the same player.

That geographic spread is a real strategic variable. A school in Tuscumbia running a campaign is working a different network than a school in Rockford or Birmingham. Distance from the metro area does not hurt in a fan poll the way it might in other contexts — a tight-knit Colbert County community that routes a link through its own channels can move faster than a larger urban program where the poll link has to clear more layers before it converts into a vote. For a vote campaign, the starting point is knowing which type of community you are in. The weekly fan-vote how-to guide covers the mechanics that apply to open, uncapped polls like this one.

For more Alabama fan-vote contests, the full state directory is at /usa/alabama/. The national index of weekly high school sports polls is at /usa/.