Treasure Valley High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Wednesday noon — the close almost nobody plans for

Here is the thing most supporters find out too late: this poll does not close Friday night or Sunday evening. It closes at noon Wednesday. The December 15–21, 2025 ballot closed December 24 — that is confirmed. The article goes up Monday or Tuesday morning, and from the moment it publishes to Wednesday noon you often have under 48 hours. If you are planning to push hard "later in the week," the ballot is already gone.

That deadline shapes everything about how a real campaign has to work here. The SI/SBLive statewide Idaho poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m., which gives supporters a full week and a weekend. This poll gives you roughly two school days. That means the first 12 hours after the article drops — when most casual fans are not even aware there is a ballot — are not setup time. They are prime time.

The Idaho Statesman is clear about what the poll is: "This is meant to be a fun way to show support for athletes. This is not meant to be scientific." Multiple votes are explicitly invited. So the race is not about who can find the poll fastest; it is about which school's support network can actually organize before Wednesday lunch.

Who lands on the ballot — and what the December 2025 field reveals

The December 15–21, 2025 ballot had ten nominees. Read the schools:

Rylee Walters plays for Salmon River — a school in Riggins that is hours north of Boise up U.S. 95, in a county where cell service is spotty and the nearest 5A school is a long drive. She was on the same ballot as Eden Francis of Capital, a 5A program in Boise proper. The poll does not screen for classification, enrollment, or geography inside the Treasure Valley coverage footprint. A 37-point game is a 37-point game.

No public winner is confirmed on record for this poll — the Statesman publishes nominees and collects votes, but does not post final totals or a declared winner in the sources reviewed. What is clear from two seasons of ballot data is that charter schools appear regularly (Compass Charter, Vision Charter, Liberty Charter all confirmed as nominees), which means the field is genuinely open to any school the Statesman covers.

The network problem — and what actually moves votes here

The Treasure Valley is not one community. The 5A schools in Boise and the surrounding suburbs — Capital, Mountain View, Centennial, Boise — have large parent and alumni bases, but those networks are spread across the metro and loosely connected. A poll link that needs to travel through many Facebook groups and parent email threads before it converts takes time. With a Wednesday noon close, time is exactly what you do not have.

Homedale is a different kind of school. It sits in Owyhee County on the Oregon border, roughly 40 miles from Boise, with a student body small enough that the basketball team is basically everyone in the building who plays basketball. When Tiana Sorenson put up 33 points in a game and 21.7 per game for the week, the news traveled fast in a place where sports coverage is the main local story. That is not a disadvantage on a fan poll — that is an advantage.

The same dynamic shows up in Canyon County. Parma (2A) and Fruitland (3A) are farming communities west of Nampa where the booster network is dense and everyone knows everyone. Aarey Harris (Parma, 21.5 ppg / 10.3 rpg) landing on the December 2025 ballot against 4A Caldwell and Nampa is not a surprise; it reflects how often a small-town candidate can generate concentrated support faster than a larger school with a diffuse one.

The practical question for any campaign here is not "how big is our fan base?" It is "how fast can we get the link in front of the people who will actually vote before Wednesday noon?" Those are different questions, and the second one is the one that wins.

For how fan polls of this type work across the region, the Idaho contest directory covers other Treasure Valley and statewide votes. The broader national fan-vote guide lives at /usa/.