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

What a season of weekly polls tells you before the annual ballot opens

Start with what's actually confirmed. Between January and February of the 2025 season, SBLive Alabama ran multiple girls basketball weekly polls at si.com/high-school/alabama/girls-basketball — not one, several, each pulling from a fresh slate of standout performances across that stretch of the winter schedule. Schools as different as Deshler in Tuscumbia and Wenonah in Birmingham appeared on those ballots within the same few weeks.

That's the raw material the Girls Basketball Player of the Year vote draws from. The annual honor isn't a separate nomination pipeline built from scratch each spring; it pulls its candidate pool from a full winter's worth of weekly-confirmed play, the same editorial process behind those January and February ballots. No public archive strings every weekly poll into one running leaderboard, though. Treating the season as a single continuous scoreboard would be a mistake.

What's missing is a confirmed public record of the annual ballot's own winner, margin, or nominee count for any specific year. SBLive publishes the result once the vote closes, but no searchable database aggregates those results across seasons. Anyone researching a past year's outcome needs the dated post itself, not a summary page. For the shared mechanics behind fan-vote polls like this one, the online contest voting guide covers the general ground before the Alabama specifics take over.

SBLive's fan vote and the ASWA's Miss Basketball: two different honors, one season

Two "Girls Basketball Player of the Year" style titles get handed out in Alabama most winters, and only one of them is decided by public vote. SBLive Sports, publishing as High School on SI, runs the fan ballot. The Alabama Sports Writers Association names a Miss Basketball through a panel of its own member writers — a closed process with no ballot for the public to click.

Mixing the two up wastes a week. A parent hunting for a "vote" link to support a Miss Basketball nominee won't find one; that honor was never open to public input in the first place. It runs the other way too. A strong case made to ASWA panel writers does nothing for the SBLive tally, which only answers to clicks. For how this state's SBLive honors stack up against each other, the Alabama Athlete of the Week ballot runs on the same editorial desk, just weekly and across every sport rather than basketball alone.

How the SBLive ballot actually opens, runs, and closes

The vote lives inside a dated article at si.com/high-school/alabama/girls-basketball, published once the AHSAA winter season and postseason wrap. SBLive's Alabama editorial staff draw nominees from that season's weekly-confirmed performances rather than opening a fresh submission window from zero.

Six words matter more than any others here: check the live post first. The weekly polls that fed the nominee pool this season carried published language allowing unrestricted repeat voting throughout each week. That language covered the weekly ballots specifically, not necessarily the annual one. SBLive doesn't always run every honor on identical terms, and the safest move before building a campaign around this vote is reading the actual close date and cap printed on that year's post, not assuming last year's rules carried over.

Where Alabama's girls basketball programs actually sit on the map

The schools that showed up across this season's weekly polls are spread wider than a football-only ballot ever manages. Deshler sits in Tuscumbia, up in the Tennessee Valley near the Mississippi line. Wenonah draws from inside Birmingham proper. Mountain Brook, a Jefferson County suburb, competes against programs many times its enrollment and against programs a fraction of its size in the same statewide field. Spring Garden, tucked into Cherokee County near the Georgia border, and Susan Moore, out in Blount County, both drew nominees from the same season's ballots as the bigger-market names.

That geography is a real strategic fact, not trivia. A Colbert County community organizing around a Deshler nominee works a different network than a Birmingham program leaning on Wenonah's urban alumni base — and neither has an automatic edge once the ballot goes live. Smaller, tightly connected towns can turn out a higher share of their realistic supporter pool faster than a bigger school with a more scattered fan base, even when the bigger school's absolute numbers look larger on paper. Nothing about enrollment sets a hard ceiling on the fan-vote outcome. Turnout does.

Getting a player nominated, then running the vote itself

Two separate jobs, and only one of them is voting. Getting a player onto the annual ballot runs through the same channel that built the weekly girls basketball polls all season: SBLive's Alabama nominations contact, [email protected]. A submission with the player's name, school, position, and a specific stat line from a recent game gives the editorial desk something concrete. Vague praise doesn't.

Once the annual ballot is live, campaign work is almost entirely about reach, not persistence from one device. Sharing the direct post URL — not the general si.com/high-school/alabama/girls-basketball landing page — through the team's own group chats, the booster club's email blast, and a school's alumni network covers most of a program's realistic voter pool inside the first day. A second push in the final 48 hours before whatever close date the post lists tends to matter more than an early burst, since casual supporters forget once the article scrolls off their feed.

For programs that have already worked their natural network hard and still see a gap, paced vote support built for sports fan polls exists specifically for this kind of open, turnout-driven format: steady delivery through the window, not a spike that looks like fraud to a platform's own detection. Programs building a wider spring campaign might also want the Baseball Player of the Year and Baseball Player of the Week guides, or the Boys Basketball Player of the Week ballot running the same winter.