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

Two Southern California polls, one ballot slot

High School on SI runs two separate weekly fan votes for Southern California prep athletes. One covers all genders. The other — this one — is girls-specific. They publish in parallel, and the distinction matters: an athlete who earned a nomination to the girls poll does not automatically appear on the all-gender ballot, and the voter communities for each can be quite different.

The May 26, 2026 girls poll is the clearest evidence of how the two operate independently. That week's girls field had 10 nominees: five track and field athletes, five softball players. The all-gender SoCal poll ran its own separate field the same week. If a supporter votes in the wrong poll — or does not know both polls exist — those votes go nowhere for their athlete.

The practical answer: if your athlete is a girl and you are looking for the girls-specific weekly vote, this is the right poll. If the question is which ballot a mixed-program campaign should target, the answer depends on which ballot your nominee actually appeared on — check the article.

The May 26 field, read straight

Ten nominees, two sports, all of Southern California. The May 26, 2026 ballot is the only confirmed field on record for this poll, so it is worth reading in full rather than summarizing.

Track and field: AB Hernandez (Jurupa Valley) had already qualified for the CIF State meet in the triple jump — a nomination that reflects performance at a level beyond the weekly schedule. Saniah Varnado (Wilson, Long Beach), Braelyn Combe (Santiago Corona), Jaslene Massey, and Malia Strange (Shadow Hills) round out the track contingent.

Softball: Rylee Thurmond of La Mirada, Mia Camacho of Whittier Christian, Destinee Herrera of Oxnard, Lila Morris of Riverside Prep, and Alyssa Arredondo of San Bernardino. That group spans from the South Bay and San Gabriel Valley east to the Inland Empire and north to Ventura County.

What that map tells you: the poll is not dominated by any single county or league. Jurupa Valley and San Bernardino are deep Inland Empire programs. La Mirada and Whittier Christian are from the southeast LA County corridor. Shadow Hills sits in Desert Hot Springs. The field is genuinely spread across the southern half of the state — which means each nominee's local community is the primary audience, not some shared SoCal-wide voter pool.

Why the sport mix changes the campaign math

Most weekly POTW polls are single-sport. When the ballot covers track and softball simultaneously — as the May 26 field did — the competitive dynamics shift in a non-obvious way.

Softball boosters vote for softball athletes. Track families follow their athlete's event. In a single-sport poll, every vote is a direct comparison. In a mixed-sport ballot, a La Mirada softball campaign and a Jurupa Valley track campaign are drawing from nearly non-overlapping voter pools for most of the week. The race is less about head-to-head mobilization and more about which sport's community shows up in larger numbers.

That changes the strategy. A school lucky enough to have nominees in both sports in the same week can aggregate two separate communities — not compete against itself. And a school in a single sport competing against five athletes from the other sport needs to out-mobilize an entirely different community, not just out-campaign a rival team. Understanding which sport has the larger, faster-moving network in your corner of Southern California is worth knowing before the poll opens.

Track and field in particular draws on parents of individual-event athletes who often share meet results through event-specific community groups — a triple jumper's support network can be very tight. Softball boosters tend to organize around the team, so the campaign channel is a team app or a team parent group rather than an individual's fan page. Different physics, same poll.

Getting onto the ballot, and what the close date actually means

Two things govern a campaign here: getting nominated, and timing the push correctly.

Nominations go to athleteoftheweek@scorebooklive.com, or via @sbliveca on X or Instagram. A complete submission — athlete name, school, sport, the full stat line or performance description, and the date of the game or meet — gives the editors what they need. Partial submissions that arrive late in the week are easier to overlook than detailed ones that come in Friday morning.

Once the ballot is live, the close date is the thing to know. The May 26 poll closed May 31, a Sunday, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. But the close day is not fixed — some weeks it is Saturday. That one-day difference matters. A Saturday close means Friday and Saturday are your active campaign days. A Sunday close gives you the full weekend. Check the stated deadline in the article before you plan the push.

The organizer is explicit that automated scripts are prohibited and that violations result in athlete disqualification — a harder consequence than vote removal alone. The poll is meant, in the organizer's own words, as "a fun, lighthearted way for fans to show support." Organic reach is both the intended method and the safer one. For campaigns that want structured help building that reach, fan-poll vote support exists for exactly this format. More on how these weekly open polls work is at the how-to guide; other California contests are collected at /usa/california/, and the full national directory is at /usa/.