Maryland High School Boys Lacrosse Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters don't know before they click

Go to almost any SI high school fan-vote article in the country and you can vote as often as you want. Not this one. The Maryland Boys Lacrosse Player of the Week poll carries a confirmed six-hour cooldown between votes — verified from a fetched March 26, 2025 poll page. That detail changes the entire campaign math.

On an uncapped ballot, one motivated household can grind out hundreds of votes. Here, a single voter contributes at most four or five votes per day, roughly 28 across a full seven-day poll window. The implication is immediate: raw grinding from a small group doesn't scale the way it does elsewhere. Width of reach matters more. A hundred people cycling back every six hours beats five people doing the same, by a factor of twenty. That is not a slogan — it is just the arithmetic of the cap.

John Dixon of Annapolis Area Christian School won the week before the May 13, 2025 ballot. That is the prior-week winner SI named in its opening line. His school is not Calvert Hall, not Towson, not Broadneck. It beat that field anyway. The six-hour cap is why a private school with a tight, consistent community can defeat programs with larger raw fan counts — the cap is an equalizer that rewards coordination across the full week, not a single evening of concentrated effort.

Two confirmed 2025 ballots — what the nominee patterns show

Two full nominee lists are on record for the 2025 season.

March 26:

May 13:

Two things stand out. First, Wyatt Hicks of Broadneck appeared on both lists — the only player to do so across the confirmed 2025 data. Back-to-back nominations signal consistent production and the attention of the SI editors, but also a school whose supporters are engaging with the poll repeatedly across the spring. Second, the private-school presence is heavier than the enrollment numbers would suggest: Calvert Hall, Boys' Latin, Archbishop Spalding, Gerstell, and Annapolis Area Christian all landed nominees — three of them MIAA programs whose communities tend to be dense and tightly networked. That is relevant data for anyone trying to understand why Dixon won.

Maryland lacrosse's geography, and what it means for a fan vote

Maryland is not a state where lacrosse is concentrated in one metro corridor. Calvert Hall and Boys' Latin sit in Baltimore city. Towson is Baltimore County. Broadneck and Severna Park are Anne Arundel County, facing the Bay. Bel Air is Harford County, northeast of Baltimore. Glenelg and Howard County schools are in the suburbs west of the city. Fallston is rural Harford. Annapolis Area Christian is near Annapolis, a different ecosystem entirely. Ten nominees can genuinely represent nine different communities with almost no geographic overlap in their fan bases.

That spread matters for a six-hour-cap poll. There is no single lacrosse neighborhood whose text-chain saturation locks the ballot. Each school is pulling from its own concentrated pocket. A Calvert Hall family in Towson and a Broadneck family in Arnold are not in the same booster group; they are parallel mobilizations that never collide.

So the poll doesn't behave like an uncapped ballot, where a single large program can dominate through sheer volume. Here the cap is the floor and the width of reach is the ceiling. A small school like Annapolis Area Christian with a disciplined parent network cycling every six hours across the week is working the same mechanic as a program ten times its size — and in 2025, it won. If you're building a campaign, the question is not "how many fans do we have?" but "how many of them will actually come back?"

For context on other Maryland spring polls or the full national contest directory, see /usa/maryland/ and /usa/. How weekly fan-vote campaigns generally work is laid out in the how-to guide. A structured approach to extending reach beyond your immediate network is covered in the vote-support guide.