South Carolina High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Ten nominees, eight weeks, zero published winners

Eight. That's how many separate ballots for the South Carolina High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week ran through High School on SI's si.com hub between January 6 and February 24 during the 2024–25 season — one nearly every Sunday, each one carrying ten nominees pulled from schools across the state. No account required, no vote limit posted, and not one of those eight ballots has a publicly indexed follow-up article naming who actually won.

That last part is worth sitting with. SI's standard practice, confirmed on this same organizer's South Carolina football version of this poll, is to name a winner in the next week's article and never publish the vote count behind it. There's no reason to think basketball works differently; it's the identical si.com/high-school/south-carolina platform, the identical unlimited-vote format. It's just that none of those eight winner names has surfaced in a search-indexed post yet, which makes the nominee lists themselves the only public record available right now.

Two of the eight ballots are fully documented: the January 6 poll (closed January 12) and the February 24 poll (closed March 2). Twenty different schools produced nominees across those two weeks alone, and not one repeated. What that spread says about the poll's reach, and what it means for a campaign trying to win one of the other six weeks, is the rest of this page.

How does this ballot compare to South Carolina's other SI/SBLive polls?

Three South Carolina sports polls run through the same si.com hub, and they don't behave the same way. Boys basketball is the smallest of the three, and the newest to get documented in this kind of detail.

Two things jump out. First, the boys basketball field is a third smaller than the football version's: ten names instead of fifteen, which means the vote splits fewer ways and a genuine plurality takes less of the pie to secure. Second, the Mr. Football Reader Poll isn't really a fan vote in the way the SI ballots are. It's a committee decision with a 20% public-opinion input attached: five names, a fixed close date, and a public reveal five weeks after voting stops.

Alabama runs a fourth variation worth knowing if you're comparing formats across states: its SBLive Athlete of the Week poll caps every device at one vote per six hours. South Carolina's boys basketball ballot has never posted a comparable limit. The constraint here is the calendar, not the clock.

How does voting actually work on si.com/high-school/south-carolina?

The ballot doesn't live at a permanent address. High School on SI publishes a fresh article every week, usually early in the week after the weekend's games, and that new post carries its own embedded voting widget. The prior week's article stays online, poll and all, so a stray link from a group chat can point you at a ballot that already closed.

Confirmed ballot dates from the 2024–25 season: January 6, 13, 20, and 27; February 3, 10, 17, and 24 — eight Sundays of consecutive voting. Each one drew ten nominees. That cadence tracks the SCHSL boys basketball regular season closely, opening once enough games had been played to build a real field and continuing through the stretch run toward the state tournament.

What isn't published anywhere: a bot-detection method, a specific IP-based rule, or a named penalty beyond votes simply disappearing from the count. The organizer's own language, used on this platform's baseball and softball ballots, states plainly that the poll doesn't set a cap on repeat voting; that openness is exactly why automated abuse gets policed after the fact rather than blocked at the door.

Which South Carolina schools showed up on this season's ballots?

Twenty schools, zero repeats, and almost no geographic overlap. That's what the two fully documented ballots from January 6 and February 24, 2025 show once you map the nominee list against the state itself.

The January 6 poll pulled from Westside and Powdersville in the Upstate, North Charleston down on the coast, Bluffton near Hilton Head, Conway in the Grand Strand, Lugoff-Elgin in the Midlands, Greenwood in the Lakelands, Denmark-Olar inland in Bamberg County, and Catawba Ridge up near the North Carolina line in York County. Carvers Bay, a small Georgetown County program, sat on the same ten-name list as all of them.

The February 24 poll told a similar story from a different set of towns: Wren and Liberty in the Upstate, Dorman in Spartanburg, Blythewood in Richland County, Batesburg-Leesville in the Midlands, Porter-Gaud downtown in Charleston, Hilton Head Prep on the coast, Mullins in the Pee Dee, plus High Point Academy and Atlantic Collegiate Academy. A private Charleston prep school and a Marion County public program appeared on the identical ballot the same Sunday.

None of that spread is an accident of who happened to have a big week. It reflects how the ballot gets built: nominations aren't capped by region, enrollment, or classification, so a program's odds of landing on any given week's ten names have more to do with whether the editorial desk saw the performance than with the size of the school producing it. Dorman is the one program confirmed to reappear across multiple 2024–25 ballots; Denmark-Olar and Carvers Bay showing up at all, on the same platform that also seats Ridge View's three-peat dynasty, is the part that actually tells you something.

How do you actually campaign on an uncapped, ten-name ballot?

Getting a player nominated is the first hurdle, and it happens before most families even know a ballot is coming. High School on SI's South Carolina staff builds each week's field from the prior weekend's box scores and whatever performances get flagged to them directly: a coach's email, a stat line shared on social media, a highlight clip that gets some traction. There's no public submission form for this specific poll the way some SI regions post one; the practical path is making sure someone on the editorial side sees the numbers before the article gets written, typically in the first day or two after the game.

Once a player is on the ten-name list, the absence of an hourly cap changes the whole shape of a campaign. There's no reason to ration votes across a week the way Alabama's six-hour reset forces its supporters to. The entire task is reaching as many real people as possible before Sunday night, because every one of them can vote once and that's a permanent gain; nobody has to come back on a schedule.

Saturday games mean Sunday is compressed: a player who has a big Friday or Saturday night has roughly 24 to 36 hours before the ballot closes, not a full week to build momentum. Teammates sharing the direct article link (not just the school's name) into group chats, a coach forwarding it to the parent email list, a booster account posting it Saturday night and again Sunday morning — those three things move more real votes on a field of ten than any single large push. For the general mechanics of running a campaign like this, the how-to guide covers the full cadence, and the guide to buying votes online explains where paid outreach fits legally. When organic reach is tapped out and the ballot is still tight, sports fan-poll vote support is built for uncapped weekly ballots like this one: paced delivery that looks like real Sunday-night turnout, not a burst that reads as automated.