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

The thing this poll does not tell you — and why it matters

SI does not publish raw vote totals for the New Jersey boys basketball Player of the Week. You get the winner's name; you don't get the margin, the runner-up's percentage, or any number that tells you how tight the race actually was. That absence shapes everything about how to run a campaign here.

For comparison: the Dallas / North Texas football poll produced a documented 54.77% — one school clearly consolidated while the others split. For New Jersey basketball, there is no equivalent public record. The practical consequence is that you cannot benchmark what "winning" looks like in vote terms. You are running against an unknown number, with eight nominees, over about four days.

Eight nominees is wider than most SI regional polls. On the January 20, 2025 ballot, the field covered eight different schools from Bergen, Hudson, Monmouth, Middlesex, Somerset, and Union counties, plus two non-public programs. No section had two nominees. That distribution matters because it means no single school's fan base is dominant by default — every week, eight communities are splitting the vote, and the one that turns out hardest wins. Simple math, but the implication is real: a small school with a tight network can win any week it shows up.

The January 20, 2025 ballot: eight schools, six counties

The confirmed ballot for the week of January 20, 2025 is the clearest factual record available for this poll. Eight nominees:

Read the geography. Bergen, Hudson, Monmouth, Middlesex, Union, Somerset — these are six counties spread across North, Central, and Shore regions of the state. And two of the eight nominees are from non-public programs: Rutgers Prep (Franklin Township) and Life Center Academy (Burlington County), which play under Non-Public classifications, not the standard NJSIAA sectional structure their public counterparts compete in.

Henry Hudson Regional is the name worth noting. Fewer than 300 students in Highlands, at the tip of the Shore Conference. JoJo Newell was on the same ballot as Plainfield's Micah Gordon — Plainfield enrolls over 2,000. The size gap is irrelevant on this ballot. Always has been.

What Sunday's deadline means in practice

The basketball poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — 2:59 a.m. Monday Eastern. The football poll in New Jersey runs the same deadline, but basketball starts being covered in December, so the two never compete for attention at the same time.

Sunday close means the decisive window is shorter than it looks. A ballot that goes live Thursday or Friday has three or four days running, but most voters who are going to vote passively do so in the first 24 hours. By Saturday the casual turnout has peaked. The supporters who keep going Sunday — the team group chat that sends one more reminder after the afternoon game, the booster page that posts before halftime of whatever game is on TV — are voting into a poll where a lot of the competition has already stopped pushing.

Bergen County (Lyndhurst) and Hudson County (Harrison) schools draw on some of the densest alumni networks in North Jersey — first- and second-generation Italian and Latino communities where basketball has real identity weight. Plainfield and Sayreville pull from Union and Middlesex County, which carry large South Asian and Latino populations with strong social network density. Henry Hudson Regional has the smallest absolute fan base but the most geographically concentrated one. None of that community topology changes week to week. A campaign that understands which network type it has — wide and slow, small and fast — plans its Sunday push accordingly.

Because this ballot is open, statewide, and decided entirely by how many supporters show up before Sunday night, structured campaigns exist for polls of this type. The weekly fan-vote how-to guide covers the recurring cadence; for more context on vote support campaigns broadly, that page walks through how they work. Other active New Jersey polls are at the state directory, and the full national index lives at /usa/.