Florida Big Bend High School Baseball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters don't realize about this poll

The Florida Big Bend High School Baseball Player of the Week is not widely covered outside Leon County's sports press. That is the most important thing to know before you try to move votes here. SI runs the ballot, the mechanic is identical to its larger Florida regional polls, but the public record is thin — one confirmed ballot (April 8, 2025), nine nominees, and no published winner percentage. If you arrived here expecting a leaderboard or a multi-season history, it does not exist.

What does exist: a real fan vote, an unlimited cap, and a Sunday 11:59 p.m. PT deadline that governs every race. Those three facts are more useful than any leaderboard would be.

One thing the thin record makes clear — this poll is genuinely separate from the Florida Panhandle baseball ballot. Both are SI spring baseball polls, both close Sunday, but the Panhandle poll covers Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, and Bay counties. Big Bend covers the counties east and south: Leon, Jefferson, Taylor, Madison, Hamilton, Suwannee, Franklin, Wakulla. Chiles High School (Tallahassee) has crossed between the two in different years, which can confuse searches. If your nominee goes to Maclay, Godby, Madison County, or Taylor County, you are on the Big Bend ballot.

Nine nominees, three kinds of programs

The April 8, 2025 field is the only confirmed ballot on record, and it tells you something real about what this poll draws. Nine nominees from seven schools, spanning three types of programs that rarely share a playing field.

Maclay had two nominees on the same ballot: Ben Wagnon (3 hits, 1 HR, 1 double, 4 RBIs; 6 innings, 12 strikeouts as a two-way contributor) and Henry Richardson (4 hits, 1 HR, 3 RBIs). Maclay is a Tallahassee private school — selective enrollment, smaller student body, community concentrated north of the capital. Two nominees from one school in one week is not random; it reflects a strong team performance that week and an SI editor deciding both performances cleared the bar independently.

Godby's Jaylen Roque earned the nod on both sides of the ball: 8 hits, 6 doubles, and 4 stolen bases at the plate, plus 6.2 innings and 11 strikeouts on the mound. Godby is a Tallahassee public school in a different part of the city from Maclay — same metro, different community structure, and the two schools compete on the field under different FHSAA classifications.

Then the rural county programs. Kannon Plain of Madison County put up 5 hits, 2 home runs, a triple, and 6 RBIs. Madison County baseball has a history of fielding competitive small-school talent, and the Cowboys draw from a county of roughly 20,000 people where the baseball program is one of the main community events each spring. Nolan Alford of Franklin County — 4 hits, 5 RBIs, 3 stolen bases — comes from a school in a coastal county with fewer residents than a single Tallahassee neighborhood. And Caleb Walker of Aucilla Christian (6 IP, 9 K) brings a small Christian-school program into a field alongside 7A-adjacent Godby.

That is the structure of this ballot. Not a bracket of similarly-sized schools. Three tiers of Florida high school baseball, on the same list, settled entirely by which community routes the most real people to the poll before Sunday night.

What a Sunday deadline looks like from Tallahassee

Every SI Florida spring-sport poll closes Sunday 11:59 p.m. PT — which is midnight Eastern. For a Tallahassee family, that means the practical window ends Sunday night, and the race is usually set by late afternoon.

The pattern across SI's Florida polls: casual voters engage when the link first circulates, typically Saturday or early Sunday. A second push Sunday afternoon — the team account posting again, parents texting the group chat one more time — reaches people who saw the link earlier and didn't click through. That second wave is disproportionately valuable because it converts people who already know the nominee and were going to vote anyway.

For a rural county school like Taylor County or Franklin County, the network is tight by default. A link that goes into the right group — the baseball team parents, the county Facebook sports page, the booster group — can reach a high percentage of the school's actual fan community in one step. Maclay and Godby draw on Tallahassee's larger population but through looser networks that take more effort to activate. Neither structure is inherently better; both require working the Sunday close deliberately rather than treating it as automatic.

For reference on how these regional fan polls run across Florida, see the Florida contest directory and the broader national guide. The fan-vote how-to guide walks through how weekly poll campaigns work from nomination to close. For structured vote support on open public polls like this one, options are available through the deadline.