Colorado Girls Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the record actually shows about this ballot, and what it doesn't

No searchable results page exists for this poll. That's worth saying plainly before anything else, because a visitor arriving here hoping to check last month's winner will not find one on si.com. What is confirmed is narrower but still useful: the girls basketball ballot runs as its own weekly vertical, with its own nominee pool, separate from the boys' edition that shares the same si.com/high-school/colorado hub.

That separation is not automatic on every SI state property. Some states fold both genders into one weekly award. Colorado doesn't. Two ballots, one desk, two nominee pools, two winners most weeks. A program can have a strong week on the boys' side and a quiet one on the girls' side, or the reverse, and neither outcome touches the other's tally.

Nothing here should be read as a promise of what a specific week's ballot looks like. SBLive Colorado builds each week's post from that week's results, and the roster of who's eligible shifts every seven days. The online contest voting guide walks through how a fan-vote poll like this gets decided once nominees are locked in; Colorado's own specifics pick up from there.

How this ballot sits next to Colorado's other si.com prep polls

Four separate High School on SI programs run in Colorado, and none of them pull from the same nominee list. The boys basketball companion poll covers the identical winter calendar window but a completely different set of nominees. Football's two ballots, the Player of the Week and its offense-only edition, run August through November and close before girls basketball even opens.

The practical upshot: a household that got into the habit of voting every week during football season isn't automatically primed for this poll come December. It's a different article, a different widget, a different nominee list. The only constant is the masthead and the desk running it.

What si.com confirms, and what stays unconfirmed, about the weekly ballot

Details thin out fast once you get past "it exists and it's weekly." SI's Colorado hub has run girls basketball coverage as a standing editorial category for multiple seasons, which at minimum confirms the sport isn't a one-off add-on. A standalone results archive, the kind that would let a program check whether it won three weeks ago, is not part of that coverage.

That last row is the one campaigns get wrong most often. SBLive has shipped both a six-hour per-device cooldown and fully uncapped voting on different state editions of the same basic format, sometimes switching formats between seasons on the same property. Whatever the current week's article states overrides anything written here or on last month's post.

From Denver's basketball corridor to Windsor's small-town tradition

Girls basketball in Colorado doesn't cluster quite the way football does. Cherry Creek, Grandview, Eaglecrest, and Ralston Valley all sit within the Denver metro's dense southern and western suburbs, each drawing on large feeder programs and youth leagues that funnel players, and their families, into a built-in fan base before a nominee is ever named.

Move north and the picture changes. Windsor has fielded competitive girls basketball teams for years out of a town that, by Denver-suburb standards, barely registers on a map. A Windsor nominee starts a given week with a smaller raw pool than a Cherry Creek nominee — but a smaller pool that a single booster text or church bulletin can reach in full by that evening. That difference in conversion speed, not the size of the town, is the part that actually decides a close week.

The Western Slope runs on a third model entirely. Durango and Palisade are hours from the Front Range's population centers, and a basketball nominee from either school competes with almost no natural overlap against a Denver-metro audience unless a campaign works to create one. Sterling, out on the Northeast Plains, and Pueblo West, in the south, sit in a similar position: small in absolute numbers, tightly wired within the community, disconnected from the metro corridor by default. The Colorado contests directory lists what else is currently running statewide, and browsing the nationwide contest index puts Colorado's SI setup side by side with how other states run the same kind of poll.

Getting a nominee onto the ballot, then working the week

Nomination runs through editorial review, the same pattern SI uses across its other Colorado sport verticals. A coach or parent who sends a school, opponent, and a brief line on why the performance stood out gives the desk something concrete to work from. A strong week that never reaches an editor's inbox can get buried under a full CHSAA basketball schedule running dozens of games on a given weekend.

Once the ballot is live, the arithmetic doesn't reward one device grinding alone. It rewards reach across several separate circles at once: a coach's text thread, a parent email list, alumni who still follow the program, and a youth-league network if the school feeds one. Stacking two or three of those beats leaning on the single biggest one, and that's true whether the nominee plays for a six-thousand-student Front Range school or a program a fraction of that size.

Weeks that follow a light schedule, or land right after a rivalry game dominates local attention, tend to see thinner organic turnout on their own — which is exactly when a coordinated push earns its keep. When a program has worked its natural network and the gap is still wider than organic reach can close before the window shuts, structured vote-support services built for sports fan polls exist for a situation like this one: paced, human- pattern delivery matched to the ballot's actual traffic, not a rapid-fire burst that reads as automated. Check the live si.com article's current terms first, since SI's rules can shift between seasons. The is buying votes legal page covers that ground in more detail, and the contest voting how-to hub covers pacing a multi-week campaign rather than a single push.