Virginia High School Girls Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Four fan-vote ballots run through Virginia prep sports — here's where girls basketball lands

Start with the count, because it clears up more confusion than anything else on this page. High School on SI, the Sports Illustrated prep vertical that absorbed SBLive Sports, runs the Girls Basketball Player of the Year vote at si.com/high-school/virginia. It shares that hub with the Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Football Player of the Year. A fourth ballot, the weekly Football Player of the Week poll, comes from a completely different outfit: the Roanoke Times, covering only the Timesland region around Roanoke and Salem.

Four ballots, and really three organizers' worth of rules, since SI runs three of them under one house style and the Roanoke Times operates entirely on its own with a hard Tuesday-noon cutoff. Girls basketball follows SI's simpler pattern: no preseason phase, no weekly reset, one field assembled after the season actually ends. That single fact rules out most of the confusion first-time voters bring to this page. Other states' versions of this same SI format are catalogued at the national fan-vote index.

One hub, two ballots: why the girls and boys votes never share a tally

Same organizer. Same si.com/high-school/virginia landing page. Different vote entirely. A parent searching "Virginia basketball player of the year" can land on either article depending on which one SI has featured that week, and the two fields do not merge, borrow votes from each other, or share a winner.

The window is narrower than it looks

It shows up most in the days right after the VHSL girls tournament wraps, typically in early March, before the football offseason news cycle starts crowding the section homepage. A girls basketball article can slide down the page fast once SI publishes something else. Bookmarking the specific article, not just the general si.com/high-school/virginia section, is the difference between finding the right poll in week two and hunting for it after it's already scrolled off.

The Boys Basketball Player of the Year guide covers the companion ballot in full, including how SI structures that separate vote on the identical hub.

What's confirmed about the field, and what SI has never published

Here's the honest shape of it. SI's Virginia staff builds the girls basketball field editorially, from a season's worth of performance, once the postseason concludes. No public nomination portal. No bracket posted in advance. No running vote count visible until the article itself goes live.

What's missing is just as telling. No fixed per-vote cap has ever been published for this specific ballot. No fixed opening date repeats the same way year to year — the VHSL tournament calendar can shift by a week depending on how the postseason bracket plays out. And there's no searchable archive of past Girls Basketball Player of the Year winners anywhere on si.com; each year's result lives inside one dated article and nowhere else. Researching a prior season means locating that specific article, not a summary page that doesn't exist.

None of that is unusual for SI's Virginia sport ballots. It follows the same house pattern as the boys basketball vote and the football vote. What's specific to girls basketball is the calendar: the field can't form until the girls tournament itself finishes, which some years lands before the boys bracket wraps and some years after, depending on how VHSL schedules that season's postseason.

The mechanics, laid out plainly

Free to enter. No account. One article, one embedded widget, one winner. Here's the rest, laid out plainly.

Sit with that bottom row for a second. A results archive would let a campaign study last year's margin and plan around it. Without one, the only real intelligence available during an active cycle is the live tally inside that year's widget, and even that isn't always visible depending on how SI has the embed configured that season.

Where Virginia's girls basketball programs actually cluster, and how a real push works

Richmond and its suburbs carry real density — Deep Run in Henrico County, Manchester in Chesterfield, both drawing from communities that already follow prep basketball closely. Hampton Roads runs even thicker: Norview in Norfolk, Ocean Lakes in Virginia Beach, Menchville in Newport News, and King's Fork in Suffolk all sit inside a metro area where girls basketball has a long, well-covered local following. Northern Virginia adds its own scale through schools like James Madison in Vienna and Woodgrove out in Loudoun County, feeding a Washington-adjacent audience that's large even if less basketball-saturated day to day than Hampton Roads. Out past the interstate corridor, programs like Blacksburg in Montgomery County and Louisa County show up in a statewide field that doesn't gate by region.

None of that geography decides anything by itself, since SI hasn't published a per-vote cap for this ballot. What moves a total is reach: forwarding the article to a team's group chat, a booster mailing list, and the school's alumni network, all inside the first days the piece is live rather than trusting word to spread on its own once things quiet down. A coach or program contact hoping to get a player noticed in the first place generally has to reach SI's Virginia sports desk through the site's own contact channels, and doing that before the postseason wraps beats reaching out after the article has already published.

Programs that have worked their own network hard and still see daylight between their nominee and the leader sometimes bring in structured vote-support for sports fan polls, which extends reach the same way a booster email does, just further. The same logic covers Virginia's other award-style ballots through award-vote support. General tactics for building totals in any open fan poll sit in the how-to guide. Checking the current terms on si.com/high-school/virginia before bringing in any outside push takes two minutes and beats assuming last year's rules carried over, and our legality breakdown covers the general line between real turnout and the automated activity that actually gets votes pulled. Virginia's broader civic contest calendar, including Best of Arlington and Best of Prince William, sits at the Virginia contest hub; SI's Football Player of the Year and the Roanoke Times' Football Player of the Week run on their own separate calendars entirely.