DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing a Kansas City basketball fan gets wrong about DiRenna

It isn't a weekly poll. That's the mistake. KSHB 41 also runs the Hy-Vee Athlete of the Week, a poll that opens every week, covers every KSHSAA sport, and pulls nominees from across the entire state of Kansas. DiRenna shares a broadcaster with that program and nothing else. It names one boys' basketball Player of the Year and one girls' basketball Player of the Year for the Kansas City metro, once a year, full stop.

The metro framing matters just as much as the basketball-only framing. Where the statewide poll draws only from KSHSAA-member Kansas schools, DiRenna's own scope covers the Kansas City metro as a whole — Kansas side and Missouri side both eligible on the same ballot. A Johnson County program and a Missouri-side program can end up nominated in the same year for the same award, something that never happens on a KSHSAA-only ballot.

What the public record does not offer, at least not in any general description of the program, is a running vote count, a fixed close date that holds every year, or a published per-visitor cap. That's a real gap for anyone trying to plan a campaign months in advance. What the record does confirm is the one fact that outweighs most of that missing detail: this thing has run every year since 1954. A basketball season under center court lighting was already an established Kansas City tradition before most of today's digital-native fan polls existed as a broadcast concept at all. For the mechanics of pacing a real-turnout campaign against a program with an annual rather than weekly cadence, see the online vote-buying guide.

Why 1954 changes how a supporter should treat this ballot

A weekly poll forgets fast. Lose this week's Hy-Vee Athlete of the Week vote, and there's a new ballot seven days later with a clean slate. DiRenna doesn't work that way. One cycle a year means one shot a year, and a program with seven decades of history behind it draws attention from alumni networks, boosters, and former players who remember prior winners in a way a brand-new digital poll simply can't.

That's a structural advantage for programs with deep alumni bases and a structural disadvantage for a newer or smaller school trying to build recognition from a standing start. A 1954-vintage award has had time to become part of how Kansas City-area basketball programs talk about themselves across generations — the kind of institutional memory that mobilizes a grandparent's Facebook group as readily as a current student's group chat.

None of that changes the actual mechanic: real people voting on a live page during a defined window. What it changes is who shows up to vote and how fast word travels once the ballot opens. Sports fan-poll vote support exists for exactly the kind of open, human-turnout ballot DiRenna runs; read the current page's rules first, since the organizer sets the terms for each cycle and a once-a-year award gives a late-starting campaign no following week to recover in.

How a metro-wide, cross-state-line ballot behaves differently than a single-district one

Most fan-vote basketball awards in this directory stay inside one state's classification system. DiRenna doesn't. Because the award covers the Kansas City metro rather than Kansas or Missouri individually, a Kansas-side program and a Missouri-side program can compete on the identical ballot for the identical honor — something the statewide Kansas Athlete of the Week never does, since that program stays strictly inside KSHSAA's jurisdiction. Missouri's own statewide basketball Player of the Year tracking runs on the same separation; DiRenna is the one ballot in this directory that ignores the state line on purpose.

A single-sport, single-metro award also means the total pool of eligible nominees each year is small compared with a weekly, all-sport, statewide ballot. Fewer nominees per cycle generally means each individual campaign's outreach carries more relative weight than it would competing against dozens of weekly nominees across every classification. But the gap between metro-wide reach and a single school's own network is real, and DiRenna's basketball-only lens means a program's football or track following doesn't automatically transfer into basketball-season votes.

Every other Kansas fan-vote basketball and sports recognition program tracked here sits at the Kansas contest hub, part of the full USA contest directory. For general strategy on building a real-voter push around an open ballot like this one, see the fan poll voting guide, and current vote-package pricing is listed on the pricing page.