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

Same desk, same URL, two ballots that never touch

The Colorado Girls Basketball Player of the Year and the Colorado Girls Basketball Player of the Week come from the same High School on SI desk and post to the same si.com/high-school/colorado address, which is exactly why campaigns confuse them every season. They are not the same contest. The annual ballot doesn't open until the weekly poll has already run its full course for the year, and the two never share a single nominee list.

A weekly nominee earns her spot from one set of games. An annual nominee earns hers from an entire winter, November practices through whatever happened at the state tournament in March. That's a different bar, and it's why a program that never once topped a weekly ballot can still turn up as an annual finalist: the desk is scoring a season, not a Tuesday.

Four ballots, one masthead, no shared vote count between any of them. For the general mechanics of how a fan-vote poll like this gets decided once a ballot goes live, the online contest voting guide is worth reading before the Colorado-specific detail below.

The gap between a Monday mention and a season-ending title

A weekly win is a nice mention for a week. An annual title is the one that still shows up in a search three years later.

The two ballots pull from different evidence. Weekly nominees usually come from a handful of standout box scores that a coach or parent flagged to the desk. The annual field draws on CHSAA all-state recognition, state-tournament results, and whatever case a program can build for a full season: a wider net that rewards consistency over any single highlight game.

That gap matters most off the court. A weekly article ages like any dated news post. An annual, statewide title reads as a standing credential, and for a program outside Colorado's largest media markets, it can be the one third-party mention that shows up when a recruiter searches a player's name.

The trade-off shows up in pacing. A weekly campaign is a five-or-six-day sprint with a hard reset every Sunday. An annual campaign, once the ballot goes live, tends to stretch longer, closer to a multi-week effort than a single weekend push, and that changes how a family plans its outreach from day one.

Where the record holds up, and where it stops

No index of past winners exists for the annual ballot, the same gap that shows up on its weekly sibling. High School on SI runs each year's result as a standalone article at si.com/high-school/colorado; those posts are never gathered into a browsable list a visitor could scroll through by year.

What holds up is the process behind the ballot, not a roster of past names. The Colorado desk builds the annual field from CHSAA all-state selections, state-tournament performance, and direct submissions. It's largely the same reporting pipeline behind the weekly poll, just applied to a full season instead of one week's results. The list of finalists is curated, not open to every eligible player in the state.

CHSAA runs girls basketball across five classifications, 1A through 5A, and the annual ballot is not fenced off to the biggest schools by class. Beyond that structural point, anything specific to a given year (who's on the ballot, how many finalists, what the season looked like) lives only in that year's live article. Nothing here should be read as a stand-in for checking it.

What si.com locks down, and the one number it doesn't

The ballot itself sits inside an article, not a fixed voting page, so step one is always finding this year's post rather than trusting an old bookmark. From there, voting costs nothing and asks for nothing: click a nominee in the embedded widget and the vote counts on the spot.

The number missing from that picture is the cap. High School on SI has run this exact annual format at least two different ways on other state editions: Oregon allows unlimited manual votes with no per-person ceiling, while Maryland holds every voter to one vote per IP address per day. Neither model is confirmed for Colorado's girls basketball ballot as of this writing, and assuming one without checking is the single easiest mistake a campaign makes here.

That last line holds regardless of what the cap turns out to be in a given year: every High School on SI poll bans scripts and macros outright, whether the underlying format allows one vote or a hundred per person.

Denver's basketball corridor, and everywhere that isn't Denver

Basketball clusters Colorado's population differently than football does, and a single annual ballot makes that clustering count for more, not less. Cherry Creek, Grandview, Eaglecrest, and Ralston Valley all sit within a short drive of one another in the Denver metro's southern and western suburbs, each backed by youth leagues and feeder programs that build an audience long before any nominee is named.

Outside that ring, the math shifts. Fossil Ridge and Windsor anchor a Northern Colorado basketball scene that's produced deep March runs of its own; Silver Creek draws on Boulder County's separate, close-knit circles. None of these three matches a Denver-metro school for raw population, but a program that size can put a link in front of nearly everyone who'd realistically vote in a single evening, something a sprawling suburban district's mailing list often needs several days to match.

The Western Slope plays by different rules again. Durango and Palisade compete for a statewide annual vote from hours outside the Front Range, with essentially no built-in audience unless a campaign creates one on purpose. Sterling, out on the northeastern plains, and Pueblo West, to the south, share that same distance problem from opposite corners of the state: modest voter pools on paper, but ones a single coordinated push can reach in full.

Nomination for the annual ballot runs through the same channel as the weekly poll: a coach or parent sends the season's numbers directly to the desk, and a strong year that never reaches that inbox risks getting passed over entirely. Once the finalist list is set, the campaigns that actually close a gap over several weeks tend to work more than one network in parallel: a team group chat, a booster list, alumni who still check in on the program, a youth-league feed where one exists. When those channels are tapped and the margin is still real, a vote-support service built for sports fan polls is an option some campaigns turn to, provided it paces delivery to match the ballot's actual traffic instead of firing off a burst that reads as automated. The current terms on the live si.com article are worth checking first, since a platform can tighten its rules from one season to the next; the is buying votes legal page walks through that ground in more depth, and the contest voting how-to hub covers pacing a multi-week push specifically. Colorado runs several other statewide fan votes worth knowing about, too: baseball's weekly ballot on the same si.com hub, plus Denver's own Top of the Town and Best of Denver readers-choice programs. The Colorado contests directory tracks what's currently live, and the national contest index shows how other states run this same annual format.