WyoPreps Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why Laramie's basketball program anchors this WyoPreps honor

One fact from WyoPreps' own confirmed 2026 coverage says more about this award than any description of how it works: a player out of Laramie has been named to the all-state team three separate times. That is not a single big season. That is a program in a college town — Albany County, home to the University of Wyoming — producing sustained, multi-year varsity basketball good enough to keep showing up on a statewide list. WyoPreps doesn't publish that kind of repeat recognition by accident; it takes three different winter seasons of coaches across the state agreeing the same program belonged.

Laramie sits differently than most Wyoming basketball towns. It isn't a ranching county seat and it isn't a coal or trona mining town. It's a university city of roughly 32,000 people with a rotating student population layered on top of a smaller permanent base, and that mix shapes who actually shows up to a Friday night gym. This page covers the Basketball Player of the Year specifically, one lane inside the broader WyoPreps Player of the Year program, which spans 28 sports across the 2025–2026 school year. Basketball runs its own winter cycle inside that structure, with its own nomination pool and its own coaches' panel. The nuts and bolts of how a fan-driven sports honor typically gets run and scored are covered in the online contest voting guide, a useful primer before the Wyoming-specific rules that follow.

What WyoPreps actually confirmed for the 2026 season

The boys side is documented. WyoPreps published a 3A-4A all-state team for the 2026 season, and that release names a Player of the Year alongside it, standard practice for how the outlet handles its classification-tier awards. The girls side runs on the same general infrastructure and WyoPreps describes it as comparable in scope, but this page doesn't have the specific 2026 girls announcement URL in hand; confirm the current girls link directly on WyoPreps before building a campaign around it, since the outlet updates these classification pages each cycle.

Three consecutive all-state nods for one Laramie player is the one hard number available for this cycle. WyoPreps doesn't maintain a searchable database of every past Basketball Player of the Year going back through its history, so a fact like that surfaces only because it happened to appear in the current-season writeup. Treat it as a data point, not a pattern. One program having a strong multi-year run doesn't tell you how the 1A or 2A basketball tiers compare, since this particular release only covers 3A-4A.

How the nomination-and-vote pipeline actually decides the winner

Nothing about basketball's process runs separately from the rest of WyoPreps' sports coverage. Nominations funnel through one shared page, the same one used for weekly athlete recognition across every sport WyoPreps tracks. From there, fan support and coach or editorial review both feed into the final call. It isn't a pure popularity contest, and it isn't a closed coaches' vote either. That blended model is why a program needs both an active nomination and a reason for coaches around the state to have noticed the player during the season.

Basketball's winter window runs alongside wrestling and swimming inside WyoPreps' broader calendar, so a program pushing a nomination in December is competing for attention with two other in-season sports on the same platform. Getting a nomination in early, rather than waiting for the postseason, gives WyoPreps more of the winter to accumulate support and coverage before the classification-tier announcement goes up. The 3A-4A boys release is the confirmed model for how that announcement looks; expect the girls and the smaller classifications to follow a similar shape even though this specific source doesn't name their exact pages.

The Wyoming towns actually fielding contenders this winter

Casper runs its own rivalry before the state ever sees it. Natrona County and Kelly Walsh sit a few miles apart in the same city, and a strong Player of the Year push from either side has to reckon with the other pulling from the identical local sports-media coverage. Cheyenne works the same way — Central and East draw from Laramie County's largest population base, which means raw numbers favor them, but it also means their fan attention is split two ways rather than one.

Smaller-enrollment towns work differently. Jackson Hole's basketball following overlaps with a tourism economy that empties out part of the year; Riverton and Lander Valley split Fremont County's fanbase the way Casper's two schools split Natrona's. Star Valley, out in Afton near the Idaho line, and Cody, up in Park County, both run tight communities where a single winning season can dominate local conversation in a way it can't in a city with three or four other things competing for attention that same week.

None of that is confirmed as a voting advantage by any published WyoPreps data. The outlet hasn't broken down past Player of the Year results by town size. What's real is the structural point: a 3A program with one obvious focal point of local attention and a 4A program splitting coverage with a crosstown rival aren't operating under the same conditions, even inside the same classification tier. For how Wyoming's other statewide fan programs compare in structure, Best of Wyoming and Best of Jackson Hole run on an entirely different, non-athletic mechanic worth knowing about separately, and the full Wyoming contest hub tracks every active program in the state side by side.

Running a real nomination push for a Wyoming basketball program

Laramie's network is the clearest example of what makes a nomination push work here. A university town carries alumni scattered well beyond Albany County, a downtown business community that already sponsors school athletics, and a permanent resident base that follows Laramie High School basketball independent of whatever the college team across town is doing that same week. Getting a nomination link in front of that combination, not just posting that a player got nominated, but sharing the exact page where support gets recorded, is what separates a submission that gets noticed from one that gets buried among dozens of others statewide.

Smaller programs without a university-town alumni base still have an equivalent network; it's usually the booster club email list, a county Facebook group, or a church and youth-sports overlap that most towns in Wyoming already have running. The Sheridan Press Athlete of the Week program shows one version of that at a purely local scale, worth entering separately if a program is in Sheridan County, since it's an independent weekly ballot rather than part of WyoPreps' season-long track.

Once the organic network has been reached and a program still wants broader outreach before the classification announcement goes up, structured fan-poll support services are built for exactly this situation. WyoPreps' anti-abuse checks are built to catch scripted, rapid submissions, so paced delivery that mirrors how a real supporter base would engage is the only approach that doesn't put a nomination at risk. Checking the current terms on WyoPreps' own nomination page, and separately reading the legal basics of organized vote outreach, comes before running any campaign of that size.