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

What Pelham's January win actually tells you about this poll

Start with the one confirmed result. MJ Jones of Pelham High School won SBLive's Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week for the January 17-23 cycle. Pelham is a Class 6A programme in Shelby County — not one of the Jefferson County giants, not a 7A powerhouse. That is the useful data point.

It tells you the ballot is genuinely competitive across classification tiers. A 6A school from the Birmingham suburb south corridor can win a week when Hoover, Thompson, and Spain Park — all 7A programmes within a short drive — are also active basketball communities. The difference is not school size. It is how fast a particular school's network consolidates around one link.

SBLive does not publish raw vote totals for this poll, so we cannot say Jones won by 300 votes or 3,000. That gap in the record matters and this guide states it plainly. What the confirmed win does tell us is that a Class 6A Shelby County programme can out-mobilise the Jefferson County field in a given week — which says more about network speed than about fan-base size.

The basketball-only format is what makes this possible. On the broader Alabama High School Athlete of the Week ballot, a boys basketball nominee from any class competes against the full AHSAA sports calendar — including football players from Class 7A programmes with fan bases that can generate votes at a different scale entirely. This poll removes that imbalance. Basketball nominees compete only against other basketball nominees, and the playing field is narrower for everyone.

The variable close — the thing most campaigns miss

This is the one structural fact that catches people off guard. SBLive Alabama does not publish a fixed weekly close day for the boys basketball ballot. The close time is inside each individual vote post.

That matters because some weeks close Sunday. Others close earlier or later depending on the AHSAA tournament calendar, holidays, or editorial scheduling. A family that assumes Sunday is always the deadline and pushes their network hard on Sunday afternoon can find the poll already closed. Check the post before the final 48 hours and treat whatever time is printed there as firm.

Compare that to the Alabama High School Football Player of the Week, which also runs on the SBLive platform but carries its own editorial schedule and close cadence — a useful contrast when planning a multi-sport campaign in the same AHSAA cycle. Alabama's basketball ballot requires one extra step: reading the post. It is a small thing. It is also where most late-window votes are lost.

Alabama's basketball geography: which school communities move fast

Jefferson County is the obvious center. Within roughly 20 miles you have Hoover, Thompson, Spain Park, Hewitt-Trussville, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, Clay-Chalkville, and Pinson Valley — all AHSAA-competitive programmes with established booster clubs and alumni networks already engaged with prep basketball. A Facebook post in a Hoover or Hewitt-Trussville alumni group during tournament season reaches thousands of residents who are actively following AHSAA basketball that week.

Pelham's January win is interesting precisely because it came from just outside that Jefferson County core — Shelby County, a suburban market that shares basketball culture with the Birmingham metro but has its own distinct school-community identity. Fast.

Then there are the smaller-class programmes from rural central, south, and eastern Alabama — Class 2A and 3A schools where the entire community can be reached through a handful of group chats and one booster-email blast. Spanish Fort in Baldwin County operates in a coastal Gulf Coast market that is geographically isolated from Jefferson County and runs its own tight network. Auburn High School draws on Lee County's Opelika-Auburn metro — a university town with a different kind of alumni connectivity than a suburban Jefferson County school.

Central-Phenix City sits in Russell County on the Georgia border, a programme with a deep football tradition that also produces basketball talent — its fan base is more concentrated east of the Tallapoosa River than anything in the Jefferson County corridor. That geographic separation matters in a poll decided purely by turnout.

None of these networks automatically produce poll wins. A large fan base that does not organise loses to a small fan base that does. The basketball-only format means the football-sized mobilisation that might dominate an all-sport ballot is not in play here — which is why a well-coordinated campaign from a 6A Shelby County school wins a week the Jefferson County giants are also represented.

Running a real campaign for the Alabama basketball ballot

Two steps determine whether a candidate wins. Getting on the ballot. Then moving people to it before the close.

Nomination starts with the SBLive Alabama editorial team. Coaches, parents, and fans submit by contacting SBLive through the method listed on si.com/high-school/alabama — include the player's full name, school, AHSAA class, the game date, key stats, and a brief note on the performance. An early submission, before the editorial team finalises that week's ballot, has a better chance than one that arrives after the post is drafted. Not all nominations make the ballot; the editors decide.

Once the ballot is live, the vote-building work is reach, not repetition. The cooldown model means one device voting endlessly adds far less than two hundred people each voting through the close on their own devices. The direct poll URL — not just the si.com/high-school/alabama home — in a text to the team group chat, the booster-club email list, and a school social media post removes every friction point between a supporter seeing the message and actually voting. That single step is where most late-window gaps are closed. Then check the close time in the post itself, set a reminder for the final 24 hours, and send one more push — because the last window is where races are actually decided. Coaches and families running campaigns in adjacent seasons may also find the Alabama High School Baseball Player of the Week guide useful once the spring calendar opens; the SBLive platform and cooldown mechanics are the same. The weekly cadence guide and the national poll directory sit alongside Alabama's full contest index if you are building a wider campaign picture.

What the Pelham result implies for future cycles: when a Shelby County programme wins a week that Jefferson County's deep field is also active, it suggests the suburban corridor south of Birmingham can consolidate faster than the larger but more dispersed Jefferson County networks — a pattern worth watching when Pelham or any similarly sized Shelby County school appears on future ballots.