lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Putnam Valley, Kennedy Catholic, and the shape of a Section 1 winner

Four wins. That is Putnam Valley's confirmed total in the lohud boys basketball poll — James Apostolico, Logan Moriarty, Zach Gabriel, Mike Frye — more than any other school in this region's recorded history of the vote. The district has roughly 700 students. It is not a basketball factory in the Mount Vernon sense, not a nationally recruited program. But it keeps winning this poll.

Why? The school draws from a single town of around 11,000 people in the northern reaches of Westchester, and when one of its players is nominated on a Monday, the link moves through what is functionally one connected network — a community where the coach knows the parents, the parents know each other, and a group text reaches most of the relevant people inside an hour. Large suburban programs in a county of nearly a million people have a wider theoretical reach. Converting that reach into three days of concentrated voting is a different problem.

Kennedy Catholic's two wins tell a separate story. Se'nre Tuitte and Sebastian Jackson both earned the nod for a school that recruits across county lines — alumni from Purchase to Port Chester, from White Plains to Pelham. Those alumni chains can move fast when a player has a signature game. Catholic school networks in Westchester cross district boundaries in a way that traditional public feeder areas do not, which is exactly why Stepinac and Sacred Heart appear on nominee lists with real regularity too.

Tappan Zee adds three confirmed winners of its own — Isaiah Leveille, Jack Piccone, Christian Sanchez. The Dutchmen play out of Orangeburg in Rockland County, giving the poll geographic range across both counties it covers. None of these wins happened randomly. The winner list is a map of which communities can focus, not which ones have the most people.

The December 2024 field and what a four-name ballot means

The December 23, 2024 poll came down to four names: Brandon Burrell (Mamaroneck, senior guard), Isaiah Leveille (Tappan Zee, senior forward), Carson Miller (Rye, senior guard), and Lucas Virzi (North Salem, junior guard). Leveille won. And a four-name field matters structurally — splitting 25% each is the baseline, so pulling 40% does not require twice the voters, just 20% more of the active pool.

Compare that with earlier December 2024 ballots that ran six nominees: Kamryn Boyd (Sacred Heart), Jasiah Jervis (Stepinac), Jake Kessner (Rye), Jelani Middleton (Hackley), Jack Piccone (Tappan Zee), and Will Plunkett (Mamaroneck). Six-name fields raise the floor for pulling clear. The math is harder, not because the winner needs more total votes, but because more candidates absorb percentage points that might otherwise consolidate behind two or three.

So the first thing a campaign should do when Monday's article posts is count the nominees. Not to assess the competition — to calibrate how much outreach is actually needed before Wednesday at 3 p.m.

The Wednesday 3 p.m. close and how three days shape a campaign

51 to 55 hours. That is the entire voting window — from Monday's article post to Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET, depending on when lohud publishes. The Monday close is the only thing that really matters here, and for this poll it's Wednesday.

The shape of it: Monday is for seeding. Get the link into team group chats, parent networks, school social accounts, booster channels. Do not wait for Tuesday. Tuesday is the amplification round — the second push that hits people who saw the first message and did not click. By Tuesday night the race is effectively set. Wednesday morning adds real votes but almost never reverses an established lead. A campaign that saves its main push for Wednesday is working against the clock in a way that cannot be recovered.

The girls basketball poll, running on identical Wednesday 3 p.m. mechanics, shows what scale looks like: Deanna Biancardi of Eastchester pulled 28,155 votes in a single competitive week. That is not a typical week — but it demonstrates the ceiling on this format when communities mobilize hard inside a 51-hour window.

For a structured vote-support campaign, the delivery window of 12–48 hours fits inside the Monday-to-Wednesday frame only if the order goes in early in the week. Waiting until Tuesday afternoon leaves almost no buffer. The general fan-poll guide covers the underlying cadence for recurring weekly votes if you want a framework before drilling into the Section 1 specifics.

Section 1's basketball landscape and what it means on a ballot

Section 1 is legitimately competitive in New York state basketball. Mount Vernon has produced Division I players across multiple decades and draws from a dense, basketball-first community in southern Westchester — the kind of place where the gym is full on a Tuesday in January because people genuinely care. Ossining's RedHawks won the Class AA sectional in a recent season, and its community in a city of about 25,000 treats the school as a neighborhood anchor. Woodlands placed Noah Cherubin as a confirmed poll winner. These are real programs, not nominal ones.

But the Catholic schools add a layer that most public-school sections do not have. Stepinac in White Plains and Kennedy Catholic in Harrison recruit across county lines. Their alumni and parent networks extend into the Bronx, Manhattan, and Connecticut, in addition to Westchester proper. When a Kennedy Catholic player is nominated, the link can reach people who have not lived in Section 1 for years but maintain strong affiliation with the school. And they vote.

Hackley, the independent school in Tarrytown, draws from a similar wide geography — Jelani Middleton appeared as a nominee from Hackley's program in December 2024. That cross-county reach is the structural difference between a Catholic or independent school and a town district on this ballot. The winner list documents which ones have actually converted their structure into results: Putnam Valley on tight community density, Kennedy Catholic on wide alumni chains. Both work. They just work differently.

For all New York fan-vote contests, the state directory is at /usa/new-york/, and the national guide index lives at /usa/.