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

The thing most voters get wrong about this poll

Most people searching for this poll go looking for a standalone page and don't find it. The West Virginia Softball Player of the Week ballot doesn't live at a fixed URL. It is embedded inside a weekly article on si.com/high-school/west-virginia — a new post each week, with a new embedded widget, and a date in the title. The previous week's articles stay online, so it is easy to land on last week's closed ballot and think nothing is happening. Check the date.

That is worth knowing before anything else, because it affects how a support campaign works. You can't pre-share a permanent link. You share the link to that specific week's article, which goes live when SI publishes it — usually late in the weekend after Saturday's games come in. The faster a nominee's community gets that link circulating, the more of the week's voting window they capture.

What Anniston Shelton's win says about this ballot

The April 16, 2025 week is the clearest data point on record. Anniston Shelton of Parkersburg South won with a complete game that included 19 strikeouts across 7 innings — 2 hits allowed, 1 run, a 6-1 win over Wheeling Park. SI confirmed her as the winner in the following week's article.

What the win reveals about the ballot's mechanics: Parkersburg South is a Class AAAA school in Wood County, one of the larger programs in the state. But the April 16 field also included Hurricane, Morgantown, Frankfort, Tug Valley, and Wahama — schools from different classifications and different corners of the state. Shelton's 19-K line gave the editors the strongest individual performance to nominate, and her school's community gave her the votes to close it out.

The same week, Kate Justice of Hurricane was on the April 22 ballot after throwing a perfect game — 6 innings, 14 strikeouts, an 8-0 shutout of South Charleston. Two consecutive weeks, two of the state's top pitchers, back-to-back nominations. That is how concentrated the talent is in WV softball in April: the same names come around, and a school that mobilizes consistently across multiple weeks builds a structural advantage.

Ten schools, four classifications: reading the May field

The May 13, 2025 ballot is a useful cross-section of what this poll draws from late in the season:

Northern Panhandle, south-central coalfields, Ohio River Valley, Monongalia — geographically this ballot runs the length of the state. Cabell Midland won the 2025 Class AAAA state championship; Tug Valley is in Mingo County near the Kentucky border. Those schools' fan bases do not overlap at all in daily life, but they land on the same list every week.

WVSSAC runs four classifications — Class A (350 or fewer students) through Class AAAA (1,050 and up) — and this poll does not sort by class. The ballot is one list. Which means a tight-knit Class A community in a small county can out-vote a larger program that does not organize. It has happened in this format before, and the WVSSAC structure does not prevent it.

How the Sunday close shapes a WV softball campaign

The ballot closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. That is the only hard deadline, and everything else follows from it.

The article usually goes up on the weekend once the week's results are in. That means the effective voting window is roughly Saturday or Sunday through Sunday night — shorter than it looks. A school community that circulates the link on Saturday, re-shares on Sunday morning, and sends one final push Sunday afternoon is working the full window. A community that waits until Sunday evening is starting late.

WV softball runs from April through mid-May, so the poll is active for roughly six to eight weeks. Schools whose players make the ballot in multiple weeks — like Tug Valley's Bailee Hall, who appeared on both the April 16 and May 13 ballots — build cumulative recognition with the school's voter base. A community that has voted before knows how the system works, and activation is faster the second time.

For the broader picture of WV high school fan votes, /usa/west-virginia/ collects all confirmed polls in the state; the national directory is at /usa/. When Sunday night arrives and the window is tight, vote-support services built for open, uncapped weekly ballots can close the gap on organic reach.