Kentucky High School Girls Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Top 25 rankings feed this ballot before a single vote is cast

Before SBLive opens the Player of the Year poll, it runs something quieter: a live Top 25 statewide power-rankings list for Kentucky girls basketball, updated through the winter and confirmed active as of January 2026. That list isn't the vote itself. It's the scouting record the editorial desk pulls from when building the ballot once the season ends.

That distinction trips people up. A program can move up or down the Top 25 week to week based on results, strength of schedule, and head-to-head play. None of it is a public vote. The Player of the Year ballot only opens after that ranking process has run its course for the season, at si.com/high-school/kentucky/girls-basketball. Confuse the two and a supporter shows up in December expecting a poll link that doesn't exist yet.

What's confirmed is the scope: Classes 1A through 6A, all 16 KHSAA regions, one nominee list once the winter bracket closes. A Class 1A program from the eastern coalfields and a Class 6A program from Jefferson County can both produce a ranked team and, later, a nominee on the same statewide ballot. For how fan-vote polls in this format generally work, the online contest voting guide covers the shared mechanics before the Kentucky specifics below.

Kentucky runs two separate girls basketball honors, and this page covers just one

Search "Kentucky girls basketball player of the year" and two different answers come back, and they are not interchangeable. This page is the SBLive Sports / High School on SI fan vote. The other is the KVCA Girls Player of the Year, an honor administered separately from SBLive's open ballot and built through its own process rather than public clicks.

A player can be named on both in the same winter. The two tracks don't share votes, don't share a timeline, and a strong showing on one carries zero weight toward the other. Families sometimes assume the fan vote and the KVCA honor are the same recognition with two names. They aren't, and treating them as one costs a campaign real time chasing the wrong deadline.

Only the top row and the two adjacent SBLive polls answer to fan turnout. The statewide Player of the Year hub shows how basketball fits alongside SBLive's other per-sport annual ballots, and the weekly Athlete of the Week tracks the same winter season on a Sunday-close cadence instead of a single annual window.

How the girls basketball ballot actually opens and closes

SBLive doesn't publish a standalone rulebook just for the girls basketball vote; it follows the pattern set across the outlet's Kentucky annual awards. An editorial nomination stage pulls from the completed season and the Top 25 rankings record, then an open voting window runs with no fixed per-vote cap.

Six classes, sixteen regions, one list. State finals close out the bracket in March, and SBLive's Kentucky staff builds the nominee pool once that's settled. From there the poll runs open, with no hourly reset and no device limit, until the date SBLive prints on the post itself, which shifts from year to year depending on when the tournament resolves.

Nobody keeps a public scoreboard of past girls-basketball-specific winners and their final margins, and it's worth saying that plainly instead of implying otherwise. What's on the record is the process: rankings feed nominations, nominations feed an open vote, the vote feeds a published result. Reading a specific winter's race means opening that year's live post, not searching for a history that doesn't exist online.

Where Kentucky's girls basketball geography actually sits

Louisville carries an unusual weight in this sport specifically. Sacred Heart Academy and Assumption, both all-girls Catholic schools, compete year after year against co-ed Class 6A programs like Male and Butler. Four programs sit inside one metro area, each with a fan base that follows girls basketball closely on its own terms rather than as an afterthought to football season.

Central Kentucky runs differently. Scott County, in Georgetown, and Lexington Catholic both draw from a Bluegrass basketball culture where the girls' program gets covered with the same seriousness as the boys' side. That's not true everywhere. Boyle County, further south in Danville, competes in a region where a single strong winter can put a smaller-market program in front of a much larger statewide audience than its enrollment alone would suggest.

Western Kentucky's South Warren, in Bowling Green, and Owensboro Catholic sit in a corridor with its own tight rivalry history, separate from anything happening in Louisville or Lexington. And Elizabethtown, roughly midway between Louisville and Bowling Green, pulls from a fan base that follows both corridors depending on the matchup. Northern Kentucky's Ryle, in Boone County, sits close enough to Cincinnati that some of its reach crosses state lines entirely. An out-of-state alum votes exactly the same as someone in Union. Pikeville, deep in the eastern coalfields, carries a smaller total fan pool than any Louisville program, but one tightly organized around a single school; that kind of pool converts to votes fast once the ballot goes live.

Turning that geography into votes before the window closes

Getting a nominee onto the ballot runs through SBLive's editorial desk, not an open submission form. A coach with a specific case (a full season's scoring and rebounding line, a strong Top 25 showing, playoff results, all- region or all-state recognition) can reach the desk through the contact channel listed on the current si.com/high-school/kentucky page. A submission built around numbers moves further than one built around adjectives.

Once voting opens, the no-cap structure rewards reach over repetition. One household voting through the whole window adds up, sure, but it's a rounding error next to an alumni network or a booster list getting the direct post link on day one. Sacred Heart and Assumption both carry decades of alumni still living in the Louisville metro; that network, activated early, moves faster than a program starting cold.

Smaller programs aren't automatically outmatched, though. Pikeville's single-school fan base, concentrated rather than scattered across a metro area, can convert at a rate that a larger but more diffuse Louisville fan base doesn't always match in the ballot's early hours. For the shared mechanics behind fan-vote polls generally, the online voting guide applies well beyond basketball, and when a program's organic network runs dry with real time left on the clock, paced outreach built for sports fan polls is designed for exactly this no-cap, open-window format: steady delivery across the full period rather than one burst that reads as scripted. The Kentucky contest hub lists the rest of the state's fan-vote programs by sport, and none of that campaigning reaches the KVCA honor. That one only answers to its own process.