High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most Michigan sports fans miss about this poll

Fordson's Mahdi Dabaje did not win Michigan Athlete of the Week on March 4, 2025 because he scored the most points in the state that week. He won because he hit a go-ahead three with six seconds left in a D1 district final, the story traveled fast inside Dearborn's tight-knit Arab-American community — one of the largest in the country, concentrated in a single metro — and his ballot faced only two other nominees, including an ice hockey player whose audience was spread across the western UP. Dabaje took the vote, Greg Grays Jr. of Brother Rice (also 27 points in a district final) was the runner-up, and a Flint Powers Catholic hockey nominee was the third. Three names, one week, and the community that organized first won.

That is the thing most people arriving at this poll do not understand: it is not the football poll. The fall football Player of the Week is a separate SI ballot that runs September through November and covers nothing but football. This poll runs the rest of the year — and when basketball, hockey, soccer, and wrestling are all in season simultaneously, the ballot can mix them on the same list. Zinn vs. Hizer vs. Mashhour on a single January ballot is not an editorial accident; it is the poll's design. The sport with the most organized community wins, not the sport with the most Michigan fans.

The nomination email is butler@scorebooklive.com with subject "MIHSAW Nomination." The ballot is posted Sunday; the close is Sunday 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That window is short.

What five confirmed ballots reveal about the field

Five verified ballot weeks from the 2024–2025 school year give a clear picture of how this poll actually runs.

Three patterns emerge. First, boys basketball dominates the winter-season field by raw nominee count — four of the eight slots in the January 28 ballot were boys basketball alone. Second, field size is not stable: eight nominees in late January, three in early March as the season narrows to district finals. Third, the same athlete can appear on back-to-back ballots: Averie Zinn made January 7 (54 points, 12 rebounds, 11 steals — a Genesee school record) and January 28 (29 points, 11 steals) in consecutive weeks. There is no confirmed rule preventing that, and the editors will nominate a consistent performer again.

The strategic read from these five weeks: a smaller field in late February or March is where a concentrated community matters most. When the ballot drops to three nominees, as it did March 4, there is no splitting the vote across seven candidates — one community's turn-out determines the result directly.

Grand Rapids, Dearborn, and the geography of a statewide ballot

Michigan is a split-geography state for high school sports fandom: the greater Detroit metro (Wayne, Oakland, Macomb counties) and the West Michigan corridor (Kent, Ottawa, Allegan) run separate basketball cultures, and the UP operates as a distinct world from both. This poll is statewide, which means a Grand Rapids Northview nominee (Brady Swartz, 47 points on January 28) and a Dearborn nominee (Hamoody Mashhour, 41 points that same week) appear on the same ballot with no geographic split.

The practical effect is that two Grand Rapids schools on the same ballot — Swartz's Northview and Cargill's Forest Hills Central, both in Kent County — split the West Michigan vote between them. Mashhour of Dearborn drew from a different metro entirely with no regional competitor. That is not an argument that Dearborn wins; it is an argument that a community without a ballot rival can consolidate more cleanly than one with two nominees in the same city. The January 28 ballot had three Grand Rapids boys basketball nominees alone: Swartz, Cargill, and Carson Vis of South Christian. Three schools from the same metro, all dividing the same pool of activated local fans, against Mashhour drawing on Dearborn's network without a Dearborn competitor on the list.

For anyone running a campaign here: check the ballot for same-region competitors before launching. The statewide structure rewards geographic isolation as much as it rewards total fan base size. To support a nominee with structured vote support, the cross-sport, multi-region field is the context those campaigns are built for. More on running weekly fan-vote campaigns is at the how-to guide; the full Michigan contest index is at /usa/michigan/, and the national directory is at /usa/.