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

Thirty-five nominees, one Sunday night — what the ballot actually looks like

Most people arrive at this poll expecting something like a short school announcement ballot. The confirmed 5/19/2025 Oregon Softball Player of the Week had 35 nominees. Statewide. In a single week of the spring season.

That number changes how you think about what it takes to win. In a five-person field, a tight community of 200 people voting steadily can take 40% of the vote and clear the top. In a 35-person field, those same 200 people might land you at 12% — not enough. The larger the field, the more you need true concentration: a school community where most supporters vote the same person, and where the message reaches most of those supporters before Sunday night.

What the 5/19 ballot also shows is range. Katlyn Morton from Waldport — a small school on the central Oregon coast — went 3-for-4 with three home runs and 10 RBIs in a single game. Allison Hayzlett of Canby (a 5A program in the Willamette Valley suburb belt) threw a complete-game shutout with 16 strikeouts and followed it with 18 K and 8 K in the next two games. Madalynn Ehrens of Silverton went 4-for-4 with three home runs. Those are three of the 35 names. Getting nominated into that field requires a genuinely historic week.

And no confirmed winner archive exists for this poll. The football Athlete of the Week at si.com/high-school/oregon maintains a running list; the softball poll does not appear to have the same. That is not a gap in the poll — it is a gap in the public record. The weekly winners exist. They just live in individual articles, not in one place. Plan accordingly: if you want to find a prior result, search si.com or check @sbliveor on Instagram.

Who makes this ballot: a coastal freshman against 6A Portland programs

The OSAA runs six classifications for softball, from 6A (enrollment above 1,026) down through 5A, 4A, 3A, 2A, and 1A. The schools on the confirmed 5/19/2025 ballot cut across most of that range.

Waldport is a small school on the coast, hours from the Portland metro schools that dominate 6A. Hidden Valley is in Grants Pass, Southern Oregon. Redmond sits on the high-desert side of the Cascades. And all of them landed on the same ballot as Gresham, Lake Oswego, and Century — three programs drawing from Portland-area populations many times their size.

That geography matters for vote campaigns. The three Portland-metro 6A schools have larger absolute fan bases. But Waldport's entire community knows Katlyn Morton. Hidden Valley's community has one nominee and one week. The question in any given week is not which school has more people — it is which community is paying attention on Sunday.

Alyssa Loza of Century is worth noting separately: she appeared on the ballot as both a hitter (two home runs, double, six RBIs) and a pitcher (four no-hit innings, seven strikeouts) in the same week. Two-way contributions like that stand out in a field of specialists, and they tend to generate stronger voter response because there is more for fans to share.

The Sunday close and how campaigns fall short of it

The Oregon Softball Player of the Week poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That is the only deadline. And it is consistently where campaigns underperform.

The typical pattern: a team rallies hard the first few days after the ballot drops, cools off Thursday and Friday when attention shifts to game day, and then — during the Saturday afternoon and Sunday window when the poll is still open — goes quiet. The campaign that treats Sunday as the contest, not Monday's announcement, is the one that can overtake a lead.

Because the vote cap is unlimited for manual voting, there is a real temptation to concentrate effort on a few devices rather than broadening reach. But in a field of 35 nominees, raw breadth matters more. A supporter who votes 50 times from one browser contributes less than 50 supporters who each vote once — and far less than 50 supporters who each vote several times across the week. The goal is reach and sustained engagement, not concentration on one device.

The practical checklist: nominate early (email [email protected] or tag @sbliveor) so the performance is on the ballot to begin with; share the link through school channels as soon as the ballot posts; make a specific Sunday push, not just a Saturday one. The fan-vote campaign guide covers the full weekly structure, and statewide Oregon context is at /usa/oregon/. The national directory of fan-vote contests is at /usa/.

For campaigns that need structured vote support across a week-long open ballot — the kind where reach is the limiting factor — vote-support options exist for open weekly polls of this type.