Maine High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing most voters miss about this ballot

Most people who arrive here already understand what a fan-vote poll is. What they don't know is that the Maine Boys Basketball Player of the Week poll carries its most important ballot during the regional playoffs — the Feb. 22, 2026 edition drew all eight nominees from tournament games still in progress. That is not a small detail.

It means the community energy around a surviving team is already running high on game weeks, and the poll is live at exactly that moment. A school that just won a regional quarterfinal has a fired-up fan base that is already texting and posting. The poll opening into that window is not an accident of timing; it is when the ballot gets its biggest organic lift.

What the organizer does not publish: raw vote totals. SI Maine announces the winner by name in the following week's introduction — no percentage, no margin, no second-place finish. That gap means there is no public record of how tight or lopsided recent races have run. The closest proxy is the football edition, which used the same platform across the 2024 season and announced its winners the same way — by name only, with no totals released. The basketball ballot, same platform, behaves the same way.

What the facts file does and doesn't confirm

The Feb. 22, 2026 poll is confirmed to exist — listed by title on the SI Maine hub, authored by Greg Levinsky, described as carrying eight nominees from regional playoff play. The specific names on that ballot are not independently verified; the article sits behind a paywall. So this page will not name a winner or a nominee for the basketball poll, because no name has been confirmed from a fetchable source.

What is confirmed: the platform, the mechanic, the cadence, the playoff edition's nominee count, and the organizer. The SBLive voting infrastructure is verified from live football POTW pages — the same "you may vote as often as you wish" language, the same bot prohibition, the same Sunday close. The basketball poll runs on that same stack.

For the broader winter-sport landscape in Maine, the corroborating 929 Ticket Winter Athlete of the Week ballot (a separate, Thursday-close poll) named Bangor's John Grunkmeyer and Orono's Bergen Soderberg as boys basketball nominees in December 2025. Those names appear on a different ballot — not the SI poll — but they confirm which programs were producing standout winter performances at that point in the season.

These are independent contests. A player can appear on both in the same week; winning one has no bearing on the other.

The MPA classification picture and what it means for turnout

Maine boys basketball runs through five MPA classifications: AA, A, B, C, D. The SI ballot is statewide and pulls from all of them. A Class D school from Aroostook County and a Class AA program from the Portland metro can land on the same weekly list.

That matters for campaigns. A Class AA school like Bangor carries a larger absolute fan base — more current families, more alumni spread across the state. But "larger" does not mean "faster to activate." A Class B or C school in a rural county often has a tighter, more centralized network: one booster group, one group text that reaches the whole parent community, former players still living in the same town. On a Sunday close, the community that organizes fast and stays on it through evening has the structural advantage — regardless of enrollment.

The football POTW data from the same SI platform shows this pattern clearly. In the 2024 fall season, small-classification programs from rural Maine made the ballot in weeks when larger Portland-area schools were also nominated. The division gap stopped mattering at the point where the poll opened. Basketball, same platform, same incentive structure.

How to actually run a campaign before the Sunday close

Two things matter: getting your player onto the ballot, and moving real people before Sunday night.

Getting nominated means getting the performance in front of Greg Levinsky. The SI Maine hub (si.com/high-school/maine) is the editorial home; there is no publicly listed submission email for the basketball edition the way there is for some regional football polls. The most practical path is making sure the game result is visible — posted on the school's official channels, covered by a local outlet, or submitted directly through SI's contact forms before the editor compiles that week's ballot.

Once the ballot is live, the work shifts to reach. The vote cap is unlimited, so a single device voting repeatedly does move the number. But real volume comes from more people voting, not one person voting more. A booster group of 200 each voting twice beats one device cycling through all week. The Sunday window — specifically the hours from Saturday evening through Sunday night — is when the ballot gets its heaviest traffic, and the community that treats Sunday as the contest (not Friday or Saturday) is the one that actually competes. The how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence for recurring fan-vote polls. Structured vote-support campaigns are built for exactly this kind of uncapped, time-bounded weekly ballot.

For a full picture of how Maine's fan-vote polls stack up across sports and organizers, see the Maine contests directory. The national guide to high school fan-vote contests is at /usa/.