Iowa Girls Basketball Player of the Year – Class 5A: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why the fan vote and the Player of the Year award aren't the same event

Cast a vote in the Iowa Class 5A girls basketball poll in February, and you are not voting for the Player of the Year. You are voting in a finalist ballot: a separate, earlier step that High School on SI uses to gauge public interest before an editorial call is made after the state tournament. That distinction trips up a lot of searchers, and it is the first thing worth getting straight.

Here's what is confirmed. Si.com/high-school/iowa runs the ballot. IGHSAU, the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, governs the five-class structure that gives Class 5A its meaning. The season award for Girls 5A is published after Iowa's state tournament wraps up at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. Johnston, from the town of Johnston, is the program most recently tied to Class 5A success at the state-championship level: the 2024-25 title. That's a program fact, confirmed and specific. What isn't public is a running vote-count archive for the finalist ballot itself, the kind of number the site's Class 1A boys basketball page discloses (12,000-plus votes in a single preseason window). Girls 5A doesn't carry that same disclosed figure.

So the honest starting point is this: the fan vote shapes attention during a short February window, and the actual award follows editorial confirmation once March basketball wraps up. The guide to online contest voting covers the general mechanics behind fan-vote structures like this one, useful background before the Iowa-specific detail below.

How Class 5A stacks up against Iowa's other SI basketball ballots

Class 5A only exists because girls basketball in Iowa runs on a different ladder than boys basketball. IGHSAU splits girls into five classes, 1A through 5A. IHSAA, which governs boys basketball, uses four. There is no boys "5A" — a detail that matters for anyone searching without specifying gender, since half the results they might expect simply don't exist.

The voting mechanic splits from its closest sibling too. The Class 1A boys basketball ballot on the same site is a numbers-forward page: preseason voting alone crossed 12,000 votes in the 2024-25 cycle, and that number is public. The Girls 5A ballot, by contrast, doesn't carry a disclosed total for its finalist window. Same publisher, same si.com/high-school/iowa home base, different disclosure. And the boys soccer Player of the Year, another sibling award on this site, skips the open finalist-ballot model altogether in favor of a named-candidates article published by editors, with per-class winners confirmed after the state tournament rather than voted on directly.

None of that is a knock on Girls 5A. It just means a searcher can't assume every Iowa prep sport on High School on SI behaves the same way. Three sports, three slightly different rulebooks, one publisher.

The mechanics: what actually happens between February and March

Start at si.com/high-school/iowa during the winter basketball season. The confirmed pattern is a finalist ballot that opens in February; the exact date shifts year to year, so treat the live article as the deadline of record rather than a fixed calendar date. Voting is open and unlimited: nothing to sign up for, no login screen, and no confirmed cap on how often a device can vote. Sharing is built into how the format works, not an afterthought.

What happens next is the part people skip past. The finalist vote doesn't crown the winner on its own. High School on SI confirms the actual Class 5A Player of the Year in a feature published after the girls state tournament concludes at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines — a separate editorial step, not an automatic count-the-votes-and-done process.

One gap worth naming plainly: no separate Girls 5A preseason ballot is confirmed the way it might exist for other classes or sports on this platform. Plan around the February finalist window as the real event, not a hypothetical November one.

What Johnston's 2024-25 title says about Class 5A basketball

Enrollment size usually explains a lot in Class 5A. It's the largest tier in Iowa girls basketball, built for the state's biggest schools. The Johnston program, based in the town of Johnston just north of Des Moines, is the confirmed 2024-25 Class 5A state champion, which puts it at the center of any conversation about where the classification's strongest basketball currently lives.

But a single confirmed champion isn't the whole picture. The source material behind this page doesn't name a second, third, or fourth Girls 5A power, and padding the page with unverified programs would do readers a disservice. What can be said honestly is structural: Class 5A pools Iowa's largest-enrollment girls basketball schools into one statewide field, which means roster depth and program continuity tend to matter more here than in the small-school classes, where a single standout season can carry a program that might not repeat it the following year.

That's a different competitive setup than a Class 1A or 2A ballot, where a tiny town's entire supporter base might already be primed to mobilize on a single text thread. Class 5A schools draw from bigger, more spread-out communities (Des Moines-metro suburbs, mid-size cities), so attention has to travel further to reach the same share of the fan base. For where this fits inside Iowa's wider set of prep-sports fan votes, the Iowa contest hub lays out the full list of ballots the state runs.

Running a real campaign inside a two-stage award

Because the finalist vote and the season award are two different moments, a campaign has two different jobs. February is about the ballot itself: getting people to si.com/high-school/iowa, finding the Class 5A section, and voting while the window is live. March is about visibility — making sure a program's supporters know when the post-tournament award feature goes up, since that is the page that actually confirms the year's honoree.

Because the format is open and unlimited rather than capped, breadth matters less here than it would on a poll that resets on a fixed clock. One motivated supporter returning to vote repeatedly can move the needle more on this kind of ballot than on a device-capped one. The practical ceiling is still whoever shows up: a family group chat, a booster list, a school's social accounts sharing the direct si.com link rather than a vague "go vote" post. Direct links matter because the SI site groups multiple sports and states together, and a generic link can strand a supporter on the wrong page entirely.

If organic reach tops out before the window closes, paid outreach support exists for polls built like this one. Sports fan poll vote support built around real engagement, not scripted traffic, holds up better on an open-format ballot, where unusual traffic patterns get noticed faster than they would on a capped one. Either way, the general how-to guides on running a fan-vote campaign cover pacing questions that apply regardless of which specific Iowa ballot is live, and the legality guide is worth reading before any outside help gets involved. For the national picture of how these state-by-state prep ballots compare, the full USA contest index is the place to start.