SI Delaware High School Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The count that matters before anything else: one dated SI Delaware post, not two

One. That's how many dated, sport-specific posts have surfaced on si.com/high-school/delaware, and it belongs to football. Heading into this winter, High School on SI's Delaware hub is carrying two unconfirmed sport-specific ballots at once: this girls basketball edition and its boys counterpart, neither backed by a dated post anyone can actually point to. That's the honest starting number, worth sitting with before assuming a girls-specific ballot exists the way the football one does.

The case for expecting one anyway isn't nothing. Si.com/high-school/delaware is a live page inside a network, run by SBLive Sports, that publishes sport-specific statewide ballots across dozens of states on a recurring seasonal pattern. Girls basketball, alongside boys basketball, sits inside the same DIAA winter window the network's other state pages tend to cover. A pattern is not a post, though, and this page draws that line on purpose instead of blurring it.

What tips a girls basketball edition from merely plausible toward worth checking weekly is timing. DIAA's winter tournament bracket compresses statewide attention into February, the same stretch that gives the football hub's fall ballot its highest-traffic weeks. For how these SI-network fan-vote ballots generally work once confirmed live, the online contest voting guide covers mechanics that apply here no matter which Delaware sport ends up on the ballot.

Where a girls edition would sit next to Delaware's five other winter-touching polls

Delaware's fan-vote landscape doesn't wait for SI to confirm anything. Five other programs already touch girls basketball, in one form or another, right now.

Look closely and the SI hub is doing something none of the others do: running two separate, sport-specific, gender-specific ballots side by side, both unconfirmed, on one page. Delaware Online's finale mixes genders into a single closing-week post. 302Sports and Delmarva Now fold girls basketball into one year-round, all-sport ballot apiece. If SI's girls edition turns out to be real, it would be the only Delaware program treating girls basketball as its own dedicated weekly credential rather than a single line inside a bigger pool.

The mechanics SI's network documents elsewhere, mapped onto a Delaware girls ballot

Elsewhere in the High School on SI network, the shape of a weekly ballot is well documented: an embedded voting widget inside a dated post, a per-device vote limit, a fixed weekly close, a winner named in the next post. None of that is a guess about Delaware specifically. It's the pattern the network's confirmed football edition, on this same hub, already follows, and the format the network's other state pages publish in writing.

Whether a live girls basketball post ends up running the identical cooldown documented on the football edition, or borrows a different cadence from whatever the boys basketball edition settles on, is simply unknown until a dated post actually appears. Treat the football ballot's shape as a reasonable floor, not a guarantee, and read whatever the actual post states before a booster club schedules a week of outreach around a borrowed number.

The DIAA girls basketball landscape this ballot would draw from

Wilmington carries an outsized share of Delaware's girls basketball tradition, and two schools in particular anchor it. Ursuline Academy and Padua Academy, both all-girls Catholic schools a few miles apart in New Castle County, have built basketball programs whose alumnae networks stretch well past any single graduating class, the kind of dense, closely held community a statewide fan vote tends to reward regardless of enrollment size. Wilmington Friends and Tower Hill add two more private-school programs from that same corner of the state; Sanford School rounds out the Hockessin side of New Castle County.

Move south and the picture changes shape. Appoquinimink High School, in one of Delaware's fastest-growing suburbs, brings a newer, still-expanding fan base to the ballot. Caesar Rodney anchors Kent County's midstate girls basketball scene. Cape Henlopen and Sussex Central carry the tournament hopes of the state's most rural third, where a Friday-night home game can be the biggest thing happening in town that week.

None of this is a claim about who would actually appear on a given week's nominee list. That level of detail isn't part of the confirmed record for an edition that hasn't surfaced a dated post yet. It's simply the realistic geography a girls basketball ballot would draw from if the SI pattern holds here the way it already has for football on the same hub.

Campaigning for a nominee before the edition is even confirmed

Nothing about strategy changes the fact that step one is verification, not outreach. Bookmark si.com/high-school/delaware and check it weekly once DIAA girls basketball tips off in December, the same way Delaware Online's winter finale only shows up near the tournament stretch. A campaign built around an assumed February launch, run before any post actually exists, wastes effort chasing a ballot that hasn't opened.

Once a post is confirmed live, the move that separates a real campaign from a passive one is specificity. Share the exact article URL with the team group chat, the alumnae network, and the booster page, not just a description of the award, since 302Sports.com and the Delaware Online ballots are chasing the same audience's attention, and a vague link can send supporters to the wrong site entirely. Ursuline's and Padua's alumnae chains, in particular, tend to reach graduates well outside Delaware; a direct link travels through that network faster than a general social post ever could.

Once organic reach is tapped and the ballot is confirmed live, sports fan-poll vote support exists for open ballots of this type, matched to whatever cap the live post actually states rather than one assumed from a sibling sport. For the honest baseline on how contest organizers treat paid outreach, this legality breakdown is worth reading first. Delaware's fan-vote landscape runs well past prep sports, too. The Cape Gazette's Battle of the Bartenders and CommunityVotes Newark both draw on that same small-state dynamic, where a motivated community closes a gap fast, and the rest of the state's active programs sit at the Delaware contest hub.