Idaho High School Boys Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why a separate boys ballot even exists in Idaho

Football season in the Treasure Valley runs on rivalry weeks. Rocky Mountain against Mountain View, Eagle against Centennial, all inside a twenty-minute drive of each other in Meridian and Eagle, and a fan poll that lumped boys and girls nominees onto one ballot would bury half the field under whichever sport happens to be dominating that particular week. Sports Illustrated's answer, applied nationally and confirmed for Idaho, is to run the Boys Athlete of the Week as its own article, published the same week as a separate Girls post rather than as one combined list.

That structural choice matters more in winter than people expect. Idaho basketball season pulls hard from District VI: Pocatello, Highland, Rigby, Madison, where gym attendance on a Friday night can rival a fall football crowd. A boys-only ballot means a District VI basketball nominee competes against other boys nominees that week, not against a girls swimmer or a girls basketball standout pulling from a separate and equally engaged fan base. Two winners, two audiences, two campaigns running in parallel. For how Idaho's combined statewide program frames both ballots side by side, the Idaho High School Athlete of the Week guide covers the girls poll and the shared platform mechanics in more depth.

What SI actually confirms about the split, and what to verify yourself

Sports Illustrated runs separate Boys and Girls Athlete of the Week polls as a national format, and Idaho fields that split with its own vote articles during football and basketball seasons. That much is confirmed. What isn't nailed down in the same way is whether a distinct boys post runs every single week of spring track, golf, and baseball, or whether some spring weeks fold back into a combined ballot. SBLive doesn't publish a season-by-season schedule in advance.

Naming that gap honestly beats guessing at a number. A voter who shows up assuming a fixed Sunday-night close because a different SI state runs one, only to find the Idaho boys post already pulled down, has lost real time. Check si.com/high-school/idaho directly before building a campaign timeline around an assumed schedule. The online contest voting guide covers how SI/SBLive-style fan polls generally operate across states, which is useful background before diving into Idaho's specific split.

How the boys ballot actually runs week to week

SBLive's Idaho desk builds the boys field from performance submissions: coaches, parents, and athletic staff flag standout weeks, and the editorial team narrows that pool to a handful of nominees for the article. Once published, the post sits inside si.com/high-school/idaho with an embedded widget. Click a nominee, submit, done. No email, no password, nothing to create.

Six Treasure Valley schools sit inside a twenty-mile radius: Rocky Mountain, Eagle, Mountain View, Centennial, Boise, and Bishop Kelly. Fall football weeks there produce a genuinely crowded nominee pool most seasons. District I, up in the Panhandle around Coeur d'Alene, Lake City, and Post Falls, runs its own tight rivalry cluster that shows up regularly too. Winter shifts the weight toward District VI's basketball programs in Pocatello, Rigby, and Madison, and toward smaller schools like Sugar-Salem, where a single strong week can put a 2A program on the same ballot as a 5A school many times its size.

Because the ballot doesn't weight by classification, a Sugar-Salem wrestler or basketball player competes on identical footing with a Rocky Mountain nominee from a school with roughly four times the enrollment. Turnout, not roster size, is what the widget counts.

The Treasure Valley, the Panhandle, and District VI don't campaign the same way

A Treasure Valley nominee has scale working for them: thousands of students across five or six large schools inside a compact area, plus a Boise media market that pays attention to prep sports most weeks of the year. Getting the link in front of people is easy there. Getting a distracted metro audience to actually click, and to keep coming back if the format allows repeat visits, is the harder part.

North Idaho works differently. Coeur d'Alene, Lake City, and Post Falls sit close enough that a rivalry week pulls fans from all three towns onto the same post, and the Spokane media market spilling across the state line adds reach a Treasure Valley nominee doesn't get for free. District VI is the sharpest contrast of all. Rexburg and Sugar City in particular run through small, densely connected communities where a booster text chain or a church group can put a nominee's name in front of most of the realistic voter pool in a single evening. Raw school size sets none of that. For the wider set of Idaho fan-vote and readers'-choice programs outside prep sports, the Best of Greater Idaho Falls and Best of Magic Valley Readers' Choice programs show how the same turnout logic plays out in business and community categories statewide.

Running a real push for a boys nominee, one week at a time

Getting a name onto the ballot in the first place is step one, and it's an editorial gate, not an automatic entry. A submission that names the athlete, school, sport, opponent, and the specific stat line gives the SBLive desk something concrete to weigh against everyone else's submissions that week. A vague "he had a great game" note is easy to skip past.

Once the post is live, the direct article link matters more than the athlete's name alone. Team group chats, a booster email list, the school's own social accounts: all of it should point at the actual si.com post, not a screenshot. A campaign that goes quiet after the first day tends to lose ground to one that keeps circulating the link through the full window, especially against a Treasure Valley opponent with a larger raw audience. Two Idaho ballots worth watching for how a compact market runs its own version of this same mechanic: the KPVI East Idaho GMC Dealers Athlete of the Week, a Pocatello TV station's own weekly boys-and-girls vote, and the Lewiston Tribune Prep Athlete of the Week, which pulls nominees from both sides of the Idaho-Washington line. For general campaign tactics that apply across any weekly fan poll, see the how-to guides; for the legal and ethical framing around outside vote support, is buying votes legal covers the ground fairly. If organic reach through school and community networks has topped out before the ballot closes, sports fan-poll vote support exists for polls built on exactly this weekly-article structure. Paced delivery matched to the platform's own rhythm is what keeps it from looking like anything other than more real people voting.