PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing this poll does that the SI polls don't

Most high school fan-vote polls in Pennsylvania are black boxes: the winner gets announced, and the raw vote count disappears. PennLive publishes the numbers. Brighton McKnight of Camp Hill won in January 2025 with exactly 4,831 votes — 45.58% of 10,600 total. Runner-up Ali Alami of East Pennsboro drew 4,350 (41.04%). The gap between them was 481 votes. Those are not estimates or reconstructions; they are the reported figures from the AP-syndicated results article.

That transparency changes what you actually know about this poll. You know that a five-school field in the Harrisburg corridor generated ten thousand votes in one week. You know the winner held less than half the vote — which means the other four schools' communities were genuinely in it. You know a 481-vote lead held, which means 241 more votes for Alami would have flipped it. For anyone trying to run a real campaign here, the McKnight week is the single most useful data point in existence for this ballot.

What the confirmed winners tell us about how this poll moves

Three things stand out when you look at the full 2024-2025 winner list.

First: Parker Smith of Carlisle won the first two polls ever run — the inaugural week around December 18, 2024, after a 35-point performance in a one-point loss to Central Dauphin, and then again the following week with 38 points in a win over State College and 30 more in a blowout of Altoona. Opening a poll's entire existence with back-to-back wins from one player is unusual; it suggests Carlisle's fan community organized quickly and early in a season when the field hadn't yet found the ballot. By week three, other schools had figured out the competition.

Second: Camp Hill produced two different winners in close succession. Brighton McKnight won around January 17, 2025, and Owen Grove won the following week around January 23. Two Lions in consecutive weeks from a school that enrolls under 500 students. Camp Hill's basketball program was having a strong season, but two wins in a row also says something about a community that found the poll early and stayed organized. Cumberland County schools — Carlisle, Camp Hill, East Pennsboro — appear in every confirmed result on this list.

Third: Red Land's Colton Rose brought the York-Cumberland border into the winner's column. The Patriots draw from suburban western York County, a different community network from the Harrisburg-side schools. The fact that Red Land won confirms the ballot's geographic reach extends across the full Mid-Penn corridor, not just the schools closest to PennLive's Harrisburg newsroom.

The Mid-Penn corridor and who votes in it

This is not a Harrisburg-only poll. The Mid-Penn Conference pulls together schools from Cumberland County (Carlisle, Camp Hill, East Pennsboro, Big Spring, Mechanicsburg, Boiling Springs), Dauphin County (Central Dauphin, Lower Dauphin, Susquehanna Township), York County (Red Land, York Suburban, Cedar Cliff), and the outer reaches toward State College (Altoona, State College Area). PIAA District 3 is the home district for most of them, though State College sits in District 6.

The practical consequence for a vote campaign is that the audience is genuinely local. A Camp Hill win draws on Lions fans, Camp Hill parents, alumni from a school everyone in the west shore knows. A Carlisle win draws on the Thundering Herd's community across Cumberland County. These communities know each other — they play against each other, they read PennLive, and they notice when a familiar name is on a ballot. That local recognition is the engine the McKnight-Alami race ran on, and it is why the total reached 10,600 votes from a five-school regional field.

The schools that are not in the Mid-Penn — St. Joseph's Prep in Philadelphia, Aliquippa in WPIAL, Bethlehem Catholic in District 11 — are outside this ballot's scope entirely. For a parent in Carlisle, the competition is Cumberland and Dauphin County, and the realistic mobilization question is: how many people in those counties does your player's network actually reach before the poll closes?

For the full Pennsylvania statewide contest landscape, see /usa/pennsylvania/. The national directory of high school fan votes is at /usa/, and general guidance on running a weekly fan-vote campaign is at /how-to/.

Running a campaign when the margin is 481 votes

The McKnight-Alami race is the clearest guide to what a PennLive campaign actually requires. McKnight won by 481 votes out of 10,600 cast. That means roughly 240 people who voted for Alami would have been enough to flip the result. In a school with a few hundred students and a community of family members and local followers, 240 votes is not an abstract number — it is the difference between the booster group getting one reminder Monday versus two.

Carlisle's Parker Smith, who won the first two weeks, likely benefited from novelty: the poll was new, the school organized first, and no one else was running a full campaign yet. By the time McKnight and Alami were in it, both Cumberland County communities were clearly working the ballot. The lesson is that polls with published totals are more competitive over time, because everyone can see what winning actually requires.

A serious campaign here has two stages. The first is reaching the natural audience fast — current players texting their own contacts, parents in group chats, the school's social media accounts posting the link the day the ballot goes live. The second is maintaining that reach across the full week without losing momentum before the poll closes. Given that this is a regional newspaper poll covering a corridor most voters live and work in, personal reach matters more than broadcast. A vote-support campaign paired with genuine community outreach is how campaigns cover both.