Arkansas High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The result most people do not expect

Start here: the two most recent confirmed winners of the Arkansas High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week are from Genoa Central and Earle. Not Bryant. Not Fort Smith Northside. Not Little Rock Christian.

Peyton Hicks, a post player from Genoa Central in Miller County, won the March 3, 2025 award with 75% of the vote. Ta'Ron Hurst, a guard from Earle, won the February 10, 2025 award with 60%. Both schools sit well below the 6A tier where Arkansas's best-known programs play. Both communities are small enough that a poll link traveling through one connected network reaches most of the relevant people in an afternoon.

That is the central fact about how this ballot actually behaves. Bryant had three different nominees across the January 7 and February 17 fields — RJ Young, Camarion Bead, Kellen Robinson. None took a confirmed win in those cycles. Cain Price of Stuttgart put up 44 points and seven three-pointers on the February 17 ballot and did not win. JJ Andrews of Little Rock Christian crossed 2,000 career points on that same ballot. Still Genoa Central and Earle are the names on record.

The lesson is structural, not a one-week anomaly. A fan vote run without an account wall and without a cap on repeat voting is not decided by who has the largest gym or the deepest roster. It is decided by which community shows up to the URL on Sunday.

What the nominee fields actually look like

Two confirmed ballot weeks give a clear picture of the range SI draws from.

The January 7, 2025 field ran seven names. RJ Young of Bryant posted a near-double-double (27 points, 13 rebounds) at 50% from the floor. Gavin Hicks of Christian Ministries Academy shot 79% and added 10 rebounds and 6 assists. Blake Greer of Northwest Arkansas Hornets dropped 28 points at 52%. Four of the remaining nominees — Jacob Gaines of East Poinsett County, Nolan Bradshaw of Christian Ministries Academy, Jaylon Calton of Lafayette County, Camarion Bead of Bryant — represented programs spread from the Delta to the Ozarks.

The February 17, 2025 field stretched to eight nominees and was arguably the strongest of the season. JJ Andrews passing 2,000 career points is a milestone any week. Cain Price's 44-point, seven-three-pointer performance for Stuttgart against Lonoke is the kind of stat line that draws national traffic. Ethan Kelley of Wonderview went for 35 and 15. Five other nominees all hit 31 or 32 points.

A field this deep matters because it forces votes to scatter. When eight candidates each draw some support from their communities, the one with the most concentrated, organized base pulls a plurality — or, as Genoa Central showed three weeks later, an outright 75% majority. Cain Price's 44 points might earn a write-up anywhere in the country. Whether Stuttgart's community showed up to the ballot that Sunday is a different question entirely.

The Sunday close and what it means for a campaign

The Arkansas boys basketball ballot closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT. That is a shorter window than the SI football and some regional ballots that run into Monday — basketball here is a Sunday race, full stop.

In practice: the new ballot goes up during the week, nominations accepted at [email protected] earlier in the week give the editors the most room. Once the field is posted, the decisive hours are Saturday afternoon (after weekend games end) through Sunday night. Supporters who assume there is still time Monday morning are already out. For a broader look at how weekly fan-vote cadences work, the how-to guide covers the recurring mechanics shared across most SI-platform polls.

Small schools are structurally advantaged here. Earle and Genoa Central each have tight networks — the kind where a post in the team's group chat reaches the whole relevant community by Saturday evening. A 6A school with ten thousand alumni has more raw votes available in theory. But getting all of them to click by Sunday at midnight requires a level of coordination that a smaller, tighter community achieves almost automatically. The confirmed results bear this out.

For anyone running a campaign: get the nomination in early; post the ballot link the moment it goes live; remind supporters Sunday afternoon when people are home and online. The window is short. Structured vote-support services built for open fan polls exist for exactly this kind of compressed Sunday deadline.

More Arkansas contests are collected at /usa/arkansas/, and the national directory of fan-vote polls lives at /usa/.