South Florida High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two counties, two very different support structures

Start not with the platform but with the geography. Miami-Dade and Broward County girls basketball splits into two distinct worlds, and understanding which world your nominee comes from is most of the strategic picture.

The Broward private programs — American Heritage Plantation, St. Thomas Aquinas, Sagemont, Westminster Academy, Cardinal Gibbons — recruit nationally, carry rosters with transfers from across Florida, and run tight parent communication infrastructure. When a player from Sagemont or Westminster gets nominated, the word moves through a single organized channel: a school app, a booster list, a parent group that is already used to receiving school-specific news in one place. These networks are smaller in raw headcount than a large public school's fan base, but they are centralized and fast. One post in the right group chat on Saturday night can reach the entire active community before Sunday morning.

Miami-Dade public programs — Columbus, Mater Academy (Hialeah Gardens), Doral Academy, Miami Country Day — operate differently. Larger total audiences, but spread across neighborhoods. Less unified as a single communication system. A Columbus girls basketball campaign moving through Miami-Dade runs through the team's Instagram, the school's account, the players' own contacts, and whatever the coaching staff can push out — all simultaneously, none of them reaching the full potential audience at once. Neither model is inherently stronger in a fan poll. The question is which community actually activates before Sunday's close.

School size does not set the result here. A tightly networked Broward private school with 400 students can out-vote a 2,000-student public program if that private school's parent group sends the link and the public school's campaign never leaves one team chat. Activation rate and timing are the variables.

What the confirmed ballot record does — and does not — show

Confirmed weekly polls ran November 25, December 9, December 17, and December 30, 2024, with the cadence continuing through January and February 2025. That is the public record. Clean.

But here is the gap worth naming: individual nominee names for the South Florida girls basketball poll have not been surfaced in aggregated form the way the boys basketball ballot has been — the boys' February 17, 2025 field of ten named nominees is documented; the girls' equivalent is not yet compiled from the weekly articles. The polls ran; the nominees and results live inside each dated article on si.com. They are there to find. They have just not been pulled together in one place yet, which means this page cannot honestly tell you who appeared on specific weeks' ballots the way the Dallas football page can name the December 9 field.

That honesty matters for strategy. You cannot reverse-engineer a past winning total that is not public. What you can observe from the poll's structure and cadence: the field each week reflects Miami-Dade and Broward game results from the preceding days, typically five to ten nominees drawn from that same mix of public, private, and charter programs. The format is consistent with every other Florida regional basketball poll SI runs. No reason to expect this one behaves differently — which means past winners in similar SI regional polls, where the data does exist, give you the most reliable signal about scale.

Running a real campaign before Sunday's close

Two things matter: getting your player on the ballot, and converting real supporters to votes before Sunday night. The order is not obvious. A lot of campaign energy goes into the second half and not enough into the first.

Getting on the ballot means flagging the performance early. SI's Florida editorial team builds each week's field from game results across Miami-Dade and Broward, and submissions can go through si.com/high-school/florida. A coach or parent who sends the stat line, the opponent, and the game outcome before the editors set the ballot — ideally by mid-week — gives the player a real shot at inclusion. A great game that nobody flags can be missed entirely, even in a two-county footprint this competitive.

Once the ballot is live, the operational question splits by school type. Broward private schools have the infrastructure already: push the link into the booster app Saturday night, post it again Sunday afternoon, and the network does most of the work. Miami-Dade public programs have to build the reach from scratch each week — team social accounts, players' own stories, the coaching staff's contacts, the school Instagram. None of those channels reaches the whole audience alone, which is why the timing of each push matters as much as the volume. Mid-Sunday afternoon converts at the highest rate, after morning commitments and before evening plans swallow the window.

The ballot is open and uncapped, so the contest is purely a reach question: how many distinct supporters you get to the link before the close. For campaigns that want structured support alongside organic reach, vote-support services are built for exactly this kind of open, unlimited weekly poll. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence mechanics that apply across the whole SI network.