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

The thing most South Florida campaigns get wrong about this deadline

Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. That is when this ballot closes. Not Pacific.

For anyone who follows other SI regional polls in Florida, or national fan votes that run to a Pacific close, the difference is two full hours — and it has ended more than a few South Florida basketball campaigns that thought they had time left. A team group chat reminder that goes out at 10:30 p.m. ET lands after the ballot is already shut. The booster post that assumes a West Coast-style close is posting into a closed poll.

The South Florida boys basketball Player of the Week ballot confirmed this explicitly in the Feb 17, 2025 edition: "Voting will close on Sunday, February 23 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time." That is the rare SI poll that uses Eastern rather than Pacific — most Florida fans never notice until they lose a race they thought they were winning. So the first correction for any campaign here is simply getting the close time right. Everything else is downstream of that. Treat Sunday as an ET deadline from the moment the ballot goes live, and the whole operation changes: the push goes out before dinner, not after. The final reminder hits mid-afternoon, not late at night. And two hours of potential votes do not disappear unclaimed.

What the Feb 17, 2025 ballot reveals about South Florida prep basketball

The ten-player field from February 2025 is the clearest window available into how this poll actually works. Seven programs. Two counties. Three school types.

Caleb Gaskins of Columbus led the write-up with a 12-of-12 field-goal game — 29 points against Doral Academy without a single miss. In a ballot where most nominations arrive attached to high point totals, a zero-miss shooting line is a different kind of stat. It is the type of number that circulates on its own in a text message, that needs no explanation. SI editors highlighted it above other strong nominees that week, and the Gaskins nomination is also a data point about Columbus itself: a Miami-Dade 7A public school with deep city basketball roots whose alumni and fan base span both counties.

Two schools had two nominees each — Pembroke Pines Charter (Maximo Ortega and Zemari Days) and Westminster Academy (Alex Constanza and Alex Lloyd). That split creates a mathematical problem that does not get discussed enough. When two players from one school share the ballot, every vote for nominee A is a vote not going to nominee B. In a ten-player field where most schools have a single representative, the split-vote schools are at a real structural disadvantage even when their communities turn out at equal rates. The votes dilute; the totals do not add.

Read it as a campaign map, not a roster. Five of the ten nominees came from private or charter programs — St. Thomas Aquinas, Westminster, Sagemont, Miami Country Day, and two from Pembroke Pines Charter. Those schools tend to run tighter internal communication: school apps, parish chains, organized booster lists. That is not a generalization — it is what distinguishes a Broward Catholic school's alumni network from a 7A public school's broader but looser social media reach. One moves faster. The other has more people who, if reached, will vote. Knowing which type your program is shapes how you actually build a Sunday campaign.

Miami-Dade meets Broward — and why the county line matters

Two counties. Different ecosystems.

Miami-Dade carries Columbus, Miami Country Day, and the city's deep history of producing high-level guards. The public 7A programs here are large, spread across neighborhoods, and draw fans through community ties more than organized booster infrastructure. Broward is where St. Thomas Aquinas, Westminster Academy, Sagemont, and American Heritage Plantation cluster — private and independent programs that recruit heavily and pull from communities well outside their ZIP codes. A St. Thomas Aquinas fan base is not just Fort Lauderdale; it is every Catholic family across Broward who sent a kid there or considers the Raiders their team.

The county split shapes how votes travel. A Broward private school's alumni scatter across the county and beyond, but they share a specific institutional identity — the parish, the program — that makes a group-text campaign cohesive. A Miami-Dade public school's supporters are more neighborhood-concentrated, but the school is often a genuine community anchor that activates fast when the neighborhood's attention is on it. Boyd Anderson in Lauderdale Lakes operates on a different model entirely: a Broward public school whose community is specific, neighborhood-rooted, and likely to move as a unit when a nominee appears.

Neither profile is inherently stronger on a fan poll. The question is always which one actually organizes within the ET Sunday window — and which one assumes it has two more hours than it does. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence mechanics for recurring open polls like this one.