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

Why this field is wider than Georgia football ever gets

The January 20, 2025 ballot tells you something football POTW pages can't: Georgia basketball is genuinely statewide. Not Atlanta-metro plus a few outliers. Actually statewide.

Jonesboro is in Clayton County, south of the airport. Rabun County sits in the northeast mountains an hour from the Carolina border. Toombs County is in the agricultural southeast near Vidalia. Monticello is rural Jasper County, right in the middle of the state. All four had confirmed nominees on that January 20 field — alongside Buford and McEachern, the two names that define Atlanta-area prep basketball. That is six regions of Georgia on one 16-name list, and the editors didn't pad the field to get there.

The spread matters more than it might seem, because basketball alumni networks do not follow football geography. A football powerhouse's booster network is usually concentrated in one county, maybe two. A basketball program from rural south Georgia pulls alumni who left for Savannah, Macon, Albany, and Atlanta — people who followed the team closely, moved away for work, and stayed connected through group chats the program doesn't fully control. Toombs County basketball alumni scattered across southeast Georgia are a genuinely different kind of voting bloc than McEachern families in Cobb County. Neither is automatically larger. But one is more geographically dispersed and often reachable through a single shared community thread that crosses county lines.

The 16-name field amplifies this. Every nominee starts near 6 percent. The school whose community shares the article link first — not a vague ask, the actual link — consistently outruns a larger school whose supporters saw a post once and meant to come back. That is the real mechanism behind upsets here. And there are upsets on this ballot.

What the confirmed January 2025 data actually shows

Two weeks, two very different lessons.

January 6: Luke Jack of Creekview scored 44 points against Blessed Trinity. Single-game school record. That is the highest confirmed individual output in the facts available for this poll, and SI nominated him that week. No public winner announcement was confirmed. What the record establishes is the nomination, not the result — an important distinction when the poll's weekly winners aren't always announced with totals.

January 20 tells a different story about what earns a nomination in the first place. Tim Prather of Jonesboro led the confirmed stat lines with 29 points and 10 rebounds. Chase Lumpkin of McEachern hit five 3-pointers alongside 27 points. Jarvis Hayes of Woodward Academy posted 27 and 13 boards. Three players over 27 points on the same ballot — competitive week. But then look at what else made it: Gabe Alterman of Mount Vernon was nominated on 12 points and 10 assists, a playmaking line, nothing like a scorer's. Hunter Beenken of Horizon Christian made the field with 12 points and 14 rebounds. Daniel Ogunyemi of Milton drew the nod for 14 and 13 boards.

SI's Georgia editors are not selecting for highest point total. They're reading game impact across categories — which means a player who controls a game through rebounding or playmaking can land on this ballot without scoring 25. That is confirmed by the data, not inferred.

One more thing the two-week gap confirms: a record-setting performance carries nothing forward. Luke Jack wasn't on the January 20 ballot. Each week is its own editorial decision, built from that weekend's games only. A school that had a nominee one week should not assume they will again automatically.

Running a real campaign before Sunday night

Sunday 11:59 p.m. Pacific is the hard stop. On Eastern time that is just before 3 a.m. Monday — but the decisive votes come hours earlier. Most casual supporters are offline by 10 p.m. Eastern. A campaign that starts Friday, reminds Saturday, and pushes one more time Sunday afternoon collects votes across all three windows. One that posts Sunday evening collects from a thin slice.

The article link is the asset. Share it. The poll is embedded inside a dated si.com article, not a permanent page — a supporter who searches "Georgia basketball player of the week" may land on last week's ballot and vote there by mistake. The direct URL for the current week removes that confusion entirely. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't.

With 16 nominees on the ballot, coalition behavior is what moves the number. A nominee who pushes the link through teammates, through family group chats, and through a school booster page reaches three separate networks with overlapping-but-not-identical members. Each conversion is a real vote in an uncapped poll. The fan-vote how-to guide walks through the full weekly cadence; more Georgia contests are at /usa/georgia/. And because this ballot is open and settled entirely by turnout, structured vote-support campaigns exist for weekly polls like this one.