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

The one thing that trips up first-time voters on this ballot

There is no bookmark-and-return page for this vote. Virginia's Boys Basketball Player of the Week ballot does not sit at one fixed address the way the Player of the Year vote does. It lives inside whatever article High School on SI has published for the current week, tucked into si.com/high-school/virginia among that week's other prep-sports coverage. Find last week's post and the poll is right there. Search generically for "the poll" and you land on a section homepage with no obvious pointer to this week's ballot at all.

That distinction is not cosmetic. The Player of the Year vote is a single event, staged once the VHSL postseason wraps in March. This one repeats. Basketball season in Virginia runs November through March, and per SI's own cadence, a new ballot goes up every week of it. Something in the range of sixteen to twenty separate votes across one winter, each with its own nominee list, each quietly buried under the next week's post before most readers notice it existed.

What SI confirms about the format itself is narrow but solid: weekly, boys-basketball-specific, running the length of the season. The rest — exact close time, whether a cap applies, how a name gets added to a given week's field — is the kind of detail SI states inside the live article rather than on any standing rules page. For how fan-vote programs like this one generally work before the Virginia specifics, the online contest voting guide is a reasonable starting point.

What si.com/high-school/virginia actually confirms about the weekly format

Strip away the guesswork and a short list of facts survives contact with the live site. High School on SI, the Sports Illustrated prep vertical that absorbed SBLive Sports, runs the ballot from its Virginia hub. The vote is free. No account, login, or email address is requested at any step, consistent with every other SI prep poll built on the same platform. And the season boundary is fixed: November through March, tracking the VHSL boys basketball calendar from tip-off through the close of the postseason.

Two rows in that table are worth sitting with. No cap means the honest move is reading the current week's article rather than assuming last month's rules still apply; SI's Virginia hub runs at least one sibling ballot, the annual Player of the Year vote, with no published cap at all, and there is no reason to assume the weekly version behaves differently by default. No archive means the practical record of who won which week is whatever Google has indexed from that specific article, and nothing more.

How the weekly grind compares to Virginia's other SI basketball vote

Same organizer. Same si.com/high-school/virginia hub. Two completely different rhythms. The Player of the Year vote is a single moment: SI's Virginia staff builds one field after the postseason ends, opens one article, and the whole thing is over inside a stated window. The Player of the Week vote never really stops during the season. It just resets every seven days.

What that repetition actually changes for a campaign

A one-shot annual vote rewards a single coordinated push. A weekly vote rewards something closer to a habit. A program that shows up on the ballot in December and again in January is not competing against the same six or eight names each time; the field resets, and so does the attention. Momentum from one strong week does not carry into the next automatically. A family that mobilized hard for a December nomination has to do that work again if their player is nominated in February.

It also means more Virginia programs get a shot across a season than would ever appear on a single annual ballot. Sixteen-plus weekly fields, drawn from VHSL's six classifications and four regions, cycle through far more schools than one March vote ever could. For the football equivalent of a compressed, regionally scoped weekly vote, the Roanoke Times Timesland poll runs on an entirely different schedule, a Tuesday-noon close, one region only, which is a useful contrast for anyone assuming every Virginia weekly poll behaves the same way.

Which Virginia basketball programs show up most across a full season

Virginia's basketball geography is not evenly spread, and a season-long weekly vote makes that lopsidedness visible in a way a single annual ballot does not. Hampton Roads carries real weight here. Oscar Smith in Chesapeake, Landstown in Virginia Beach, Menchville in Newport News, and King's Fork in Suffolk all sit inside a metro area where prep basketball draws a genuinely large audience most winters. Richmond's city and near-suburban programs, John Marshall, Huguenot, and Meadowbrook in neighboring Chesterfield County, cluster closely enough that their fan bases regularly overlap.

Northern Virginia adds its own scale. Alexandria City draws on a dense, digitally connected Washington, D.C.-area audience, even in a sport where the region is not always the first name that comes to mind. Petersburg, a smaller program south of Richmond off I-95, and Highland Springs in Henrico County have both appeared often enough on SI's Virginia ballots across sports to suggest communities that turn out reliably when a nominee is on the ballot.

None of that geography is destiny. SI has not published a per-week cap for this ballot, and the annual sibling vote runs the same way: uncapped, or at least not stated. In an uncapped format, turnout beats enrollment every time it gets tested. A smaller program with a tight, fast-moving parent and alumni network can outproduce a much larger school whose supporters are real in number but slower to actually click. For the broader Virginia contest picture beyond basketball, the Virginia contest hub ties the state's full slate together, and the national fan-vote index shows how this format sits next to comparable weekly polls in other states.

Getting a nomination in, then doing it again next week

There is no public submission form specific to this ballot. SI's Virginia staff builds each week's field editorially, from that week's actual results, not from an open nomination portal. A coach or program contact hoping to get a player considered generally needs to reach the Virginia high school sports desk through si.com's general contact channels, and doing that promptly after a standout game matters more than doing it days later once that week's article is already live.

Because the format resets weekly, "campaign" is really the wrong word for it. It is closer to a habit a program either builds or does not. A school whose booster group, team parent chat, and alumni list already know to check si.com/high-school/virginia every week has a real structural edge over one that only remembers to look when a friend forwards a link. Direct-linking the actual article, not just the player's name, to every one of those channels the moment a nomination lands is what separates a program that shows up in the vote count from one that shows up on the ballot and nowhere else.

General tactics for building totals in open fan polls are covered in the how-to guide, adjusted here for a ballot whose exact rules are not published until each week's article goes live. When a nominee's organic network taps out mid-week and the gap to the leader is still real, some families turn to paid fan-poll vote support built for open ballots like this one; the same approach applies across Virginia's other SI award votes through award-vote support. Checking that week's actual rules on si.com/high-school/virginia before spending any budget is still worth doing first, since terms can shift from one article to the next. Our legality overview walks through what counts as reasonable in this kind of open contest voting.