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

The six-hour rule is the whole game

Most people who stumble onto this poll assume it works like the Maryland football POTW — no stated cap, vote as often as you like, everything decided by who sends the link hardest on Sunday. The basketball poll is different. SI's platform enforces a six-hour window between votes per person. That single fact rewrites the strategy entirely.

A voter who casts once Sunday afternoon and walks away contributes one vote. The same voter who votes at noon, 6 p.m., and midnight has cast three — each legitimate, each within the cap — and has done so without violating anything. Multiply that across a school's active supporters and the math favors the school that organizes around the six-hour clock, not the one that texts the link once and hopes. The how-to guide covers the weekly rhythm of recurring fan polls in more detail.

The other implication: a small school with a tight, responsive community can generate more total votes than a large school whose supporters each vote once and stop. Smithsburg in western Maryland is not a large school by any measure. It had two nominees on the February 2, 2026 ballot. A school that size, if it gets its community to hit every six-hour cycle across the week, is competitive with any program in the state.

February 2, 2026: what the eight-name ballot tells you

The confirmed February 2 ballot ran eight nominees, which is bigger than a typical girls basketball field. Two things stand out immediately when you look at the list.

First: two schools had two nominees each. Smithsburg sent both Claire Bono and Skyla Mastronardi. St. Frances Academy sent both Khloe Ison and Mone't Edwards. That is a structural problem for each of those schools unless their supporters make a deliberate choice. If Smithsburg's community splits its votes evenly between Bono and Mastronardi, each gets roughly half of what a unified Smithsburg push would deliver. The same applies to St. Frances. A school with a single nominee — say, Bowie (Autumn Welch won the previous week from exactly that position) — needs only a united push behind one name.

Second: the ballot spans the state from Wicomico County on the Eastern Shore (Se'Lah Foreman) to Frederick in the Piedmont (Jameirah Thompson) to Bullis in Montgomery County (Adora Nwude) to a private Christian school in Mount Airy (Avery Witter). These communities share nothing geographically. What they share is the same Sunday-night deadline and the same six-hour cap. The race between them is purely about whose supporters check back most often.

The private schools on this list — Bullis, St. Frances, Mount Airy Christian — are not here by accident. SI's poll does not filter by MPSSAA classification. And private schools in Maryland girls basketball are not background programs. St. Frances Academy has been among the elite teams in the Mid-Atlantic for years. Bullis plays in the WCAC, one of the most competitive conferences in the country at the prep level. Their presence on a statewide public-vote ballot is routine; their alumni and donor networks are real.

How Maryland's girls basketball geography actually moves votes

Autumn Welch winning the week before the February 2 ballot from Bowie is worth a close look. Bowie is a Prince George's County public school — a large, diverse suburban district with a strong basketball culture and an active local following. It is exactly the kind of program that can consolidate a single nominee and drive a clean win. Nobody split the Prince George's County vote that week.

The Eastern Shore is different in structure. Se'Lah Foreman representing Wicomico is drawing from a community that is geographically isolated from the Baltimore-Washington metro. Wicomico County supporters who want to vote are doing so entirely on their own initiative — there is no big metro network to pull from. But the Eastern Shore's high school communities tend to be tight. A single group chat or booster page there can reach a high percentage of the actual fanbase quickly, which matters more than raw population.

Western Maryland programs like Smithsburg in Washington County occupy similar territory. Not large. But the community around a school in Smithsburg knows everyone. The question with those programs is always whether someone organizes the network deliberately, or lets the opportunity pass.

For broader Maryland contest coverage, the state directory is at /usa/maryland/. The full national poll guide lives at /usa/.