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

The poll most Maine basketball fans do not know exists

Maine high school basketball has two separate weekly fan-vote ecosystems, and most people who vote in one have never seen the other. The 92.9 The Ticket poll is the one with the wider name recognition — it runs year-round, covers every sport, closes Thursday, and gets heavy local radio promotion. The High School on SI girls basketball poll is narrower, quieter, and closes Sunday. Narrower means the field is basketball-specific every week. Quieter means turnout is lower and more concentrated, which is a structural advantage for any school that finds the ballot and moves.

The Feb. 23, 2026 edition is the most recent confirmed ballot. It ran during Maine regional tournament week, which is exactly when school communities are already activated — students tracking brackets, parents driving to gyms, boosters following every result. A fan-vote poll landing in that window does not have to create momentum; it just has to reach people who already have it. Kylie Lamson and Maddie Provost are the two names confirmed from the SI Maine hub listing for that ballot, alongside additional nominees from regional play whose names are not publicly accessible without the full article.

No public winner is confirmed for the girls basketball poll. The winner appears in the following week's article introduction — the same pattern the football POTW uses — and no vote totals or percentages are published. The contest is decided by turnout, not by any threshold the organizer has ever stated publicly.

What the football poll reveals about how this platform actually works

The girls basketball POTW is new enough that its own confirmed win data is thin. But the Maine football Player of the Week runs on the identical SBLive platform under the same editorial structure, and three seasons of fetched ballot pages tell you almost everything that matters mechanically.

The football poll's October and November 2024 pages confirm the mechanic directly: "You may vote as often as you wish" with no per-period cap stated. Automated scripts are explicitly banned — the pages say nominees can be removed if automated voting is verified. Beyond that, the mechanic is open. One supporter with the article URL can vote repeatedly; the ceiling is time, not rules.

The football ballots also reveal how varied a Maine field gets. The Nov. 5, 2024 football list had eight nominees spanning Houlton/Hodgdon/SAA/GHCA co-op in Aroostook County, Spruce Mountain in Franklin County, both Oceanside players from Knox County, and players from Massabesic, Portland, Messalonskee, and Bonny Eagle — essentially a cross-section of the state. Girls basketball draws the same way. A Class D program in Washington County can land on the same ballot as a Class AA Bangor-area school. The MPA does not sort these by classification before the editors build the list.

The Sunday close is the key structural difference. By Thursday night the Ticket poll is over. The SI ballot is still running. A campaign that knows about both can sequence them — push hard for Thursday on one, extend through Sunday on the other. Most people treating these as the same thing are leaving votes on the table.

Tournament week and why it changes the campaign math

The Feb. 23, 2026 ballot landing during MPA regional tournament week is not coincidence — SBLive nominates from the biggest performances of the preceding days, and the biggest performances in late February are tournament games. But tournament week changes more than just who is on the ballot.

When a school's girls basketball team is alive in the regionals, the community around that program is already paying attention in a way it does not during a regular-season Tuesday night. Parents who otherwise only see game highlights are refreshing scores. Alumni who graduated years ago are following the bracket. Students are talking about it in hallways and group chats. Drop a voting link into that environment and you are not asking people to care about something new — you are giving already-engaged people one more thing to do for a team they are already following.

The same logic cuts the other way for schools whose season ended before tournament week. A nominee whose team is eliminated has a fan base that may have emotionally checked out. The football POTW runs a dedicated playoff edition once the brackets begin, and by that point the nominees are concentrated among teams that are still alive. A tournament-week girls basketball ballot works the same way: the schools with live brackets have live communities, and the vote often reflects that.

John Bapst (Claire Gaetani was a Dec. 2025 nominee on the 929 Ticket poll) and Caribou (Madelyn Deprey, same window) represent the kind of programs that surface in Maine girls basketball in winter. Both are historically strong in their classifications — Bapst in central Maine, Caribou in Aroostook County — and both draw from communities where girls basketball is a genuine focal point, not a secondary sport. When those programs make the SI ballot during tournament week, their communities are the ones most likely to already have the phones out.

For more Maine fan-vote context, the Maine hub covers the state's confirmed weekly polls. The full national directory is at /usa/. Weekly open-platform polls with a Sunday close are exactly where vote-support campaigns are built to operate — reach is the only variable the organizer has not capped. The how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence that applies to recurring polls like this one.