California High School Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most supporters arriving here don't know

Most people who find this poll assume it's regional. A NorCal list, maybe, or a SoCal bracket. That assumption is wrong, and it matters for how you run a campaign.

The California High School Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week is genuinely statewide, and the March 4, 2025 ballot makes that concrete: 20 nominees drawn from Burney in Shasta County — a small mountain-town school near the Oregon border — all the way down to Ontario Christian in San Bernardino County, roughly 700 miles by road. Aaliyah Perez, a Burney freshman, was on the same list as Tati Griffin, who had just led Ontario Christian to the CIF-SS Open Division title that week with 29 points and 12 rebounds. Two schools separated by every CIF sectional boundary in California, competing on identical terms.

The second thing most supporters don't know: the deadline. Sunday. 11:59 p.m. Pacific. Not Monday — the football polls run Monday, but this ballot does not. A campaign that finds the poll on Monday morning is finding a closed poll. The decisive window runs Saturday night through Sunday evening, which is roughly 48 hours, not seven days.

Put those two facts together — statewide field, compressed Sunday close — and the strategic picture is clear. Twenty nominees means the vote fragments badly unless one school's supporters move together. And the Sunday deadline means late-starters lose.

What the March 4, 2025 field reveals about the ballot's range

Twenty names. That's the field size confirmed on the March 4, 2025 ballot — larger than SI's California football poll and nearly twice the field of most state basketball polls elsewhere. Here's who was on it:

Read the county column. Sacramento to San Mateo to San Bernardino to Shasta to Sonoma to Fresno — no regional clustering. The editors pull from wherever the performances are, regardless of CIF section or geography. That is worth knowing because a school in Reedley and a school in Atherton and a school in Napa all draw on entirely different fan networks, and none of those networks naturally overlap.

The Faith Christian (Folsom) situation is the clearest example of what happens when a school doesn't consolidate. Lauren Harris put up 66 points in two games. A legitimate case for the win, statistically. But Presley Berry was on the same ballot from the same school, drawing from the same Folsom community, the same booster group chats, the same Saturday-night group text that could have pushed every contact to one name. That is the split: two nominees, 18 opponents, and a community that couldn't give either player the concentrated push a single Folsom rallying point would have produced by Sunday at midnight.

Platform mechanics and the Sunday window

The poll runs inside a dated article on si.com, not on a permanent standings page. After the weekend's games, the new ballot goes up under the Girls Basketball section at si.com/high-school/california/girls-basketball/ — that hub links the active poll and older winner write-ups. Older articles stay live and technically accessible, so confirm the date before voting.

On the cap: the organizer's stated policy is "we do not set limits on how many times a fan can vote during the competition." That language is on the live poll page. No per-hour or per-session restriction is posted. The only real constraint is the Sunday 11:59 p.m. Pacific close.

That Sunday deadline is the thing. A basketball weekend runs Friday night and Saturday; by Sunday afternoon many casual supporters have mentally moved on. The committed window — Saturday night through Sunday evening — is tight enough that a school whose network activates fast beats one that relies on passive sharing. Structured vote support for a weekly poll like this operates inside a 48-to-72-hour campaign, not a full week. A school whose network activates Saturday night rather than Monday will find the recurring-poll cadence at /how-to/ — the California fan-vote directory at /usa/california/ shows how this ballot sits alongside the state's other open polls, and the full national directory is at /usa/.