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

The cap most voters get wrong

If you've voted in the Oregon football poll before, you know how it works: unlimited votes, no login, grind through the week. The girls basketball poll runs on a different rule. The 3/10/2025 ballot confirmed one vote per six hours per person. Earlier in that same season — the 1/27/2025 ballot — the poll stated unlimited voting. The platform shifted the rule mid-season, and the 3/10 rate is what holds now.

That single fact changes everything about how you approach a campaign. One person voting every six hours from Monday morning through Sunday night casts about 28 votes total — four per day across seven days. There's no grinding your way to a thousand votes from one browser. The ceiling is fixed per voter. So the only variable that moves the total is the number of distinct people you reach, not how hard one superfan works on Sunday.

Contrast the football poll: unlimited, no clock, pure endurance. The girls basketball poll is the opposite — it rewards width over depth, community over intensity. Knowing that before the ballot opens is the difference between a campaign that scales and one that stalls.

What the 3/10/2025 and 1/27/2025 ballots actually looked like

The last confirmed ballot before the 2024-25 OSAA season ended — the 3/10/2025 poll — drew 28 nominees statewide. A few of the stat lines:

Read that field for a minute. Isabel McCauley putting up 42 points and 8 steals in a single game is eye-catching on any ballot. Akylah Kaino's line — 32, 19, 10, 7, 4 — is a stat sheet that reads like a misprint. Burns is a 3A school in eastern Oregon, a long drive from Portland; that kind of production lands on the same statewide ballot as large suburban programs from the Portland metro.

The 1/27/2025 ballot was similar. Sahara Kramer of Oakland put up 33 points with 16 in the second quarter alone. Kaitlyn Siegner of Crane posted 32. Ceanna Forney of Jesuit went 25 points, 25 rebounds, and 13 blocks across two games. Payton Starwalt of West Albany had 26 points, 5 three-pointers, 7 assists, and 7 steals. Sara Barhoum appeared again with 30 points and 7 threes. The ballot that week covered the full range of Oregon girls basketball, from large Portland-area programs to a two-win rural stretch team.

That range is the point. OSAA has six classifications; a fan vote does not filter by enrollment. A small-school scorer from Crane and a large-program scorer from Clackamas on the same ballot is not a mistake — it is the premise.

The Oregon spread: Portland metro versus small-school east

The two confirmed ballots show two very different community types competing in the same poll, and the 6-hour cap makes the community structure matter more than it would on an unlimited ballot.

The Portland metro programs — Clackamas, South Salem, Century, Wilsonville, Jesuit — draw from large suburban families and wide social networks. There are more potential voters in absolute terms, but those networks are also more diffuse: the link travels through many loosely connected groups before it converts to six-hour-spaced votes.

The smaller-school programs work differently. Burns is a 3A school in Harney County, the largest county in Oregon by area and one of the least populated. But that means the community is tight. Cascade Christian is a smaller private school. North Douglas, Oakland, Crane — these are programs where the school is the community's main shared institution, and a poll link circulates through what is effectively one connected group rather than fifty loosely related ones. When the cap means every vote requires a separate six-hour clock from a distinct person, that kind of density is an actual advantage.

None of this means a 6A school cannot win. It means the math is different from what you'd assume. A smaller program whose community votes in tight coordination, six hours apart across seven days, can outperform a larger community that sends the link once and forgets it by Wednesday.

Running a week from Monday to Sunday

Two distinct tasks: getting your player nominated, and getting votes to her once she's on the ballot.

Nominations go to Dan Brood at [email protected], or tag @sbliveor on Twitter or Instagram. Weekend games are what feed the field, so a submission that arrives Saturday night or Sunday morning — player, school, position, full stat line, opponent, score — gives Brood what he needs before the ballot is assembled. A standout game that nobody flags can simply be missed.

Once the ballot goes live, the work is arithmetic. At one vote per six hours, each supporter contributes at most 28 votes across the week. The goal is the number of supporters, not the frequency per supporter. That means: the full team texting their own networks, the booster page posting Sunday and again Monday and again Wednesday, a reminder going out Friday when most people have forgotten. Because each voter is capped at the same six-hour rate, a message that genuinely reaches more distinct people is worth more than one that reaches the same people twice.

That is also why structured campaigns work differently on this poll versus the football poll. On football, one service can grind volume through a single channel. Here, reach matters more than intensity — which is what a vote-support campaign that distributes across a wider audience actually does. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence for ongoing fan polls. For Oregon-specific fan votes, see the Oregon contests directory or the full national directory.