VarsityWA Basketball Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot, two genders, six classifications — how VarsityWA built its basketball poll differently

Most high school sports fan-vote polls pick a lane: boys basketball gets its own bracket, girls gets another, and the results never share a denominator. Todd Milles made a different call for VarsityWA's basketball series. Boys and girls nominees go onto the same ten-person ballot every week, and the reader vote is one unified count.

The December 8–13, 2025 field shows what that looks like in practice. Jacey Boesel of Deer Park put up a triple-double — 19 points, 12 rebounds, 10 steals — and sat alongside Tyran Stokes of Rainier Beach (27 points, 14 rebounds, 6 assists) on the same Substack embed. Finley Parcher of Lynden shot 12-of-15 for 32 points. Cooper Fallon of Toledo had 23 points, 24 rebounds, 5 blocks. A 2B program from outside Olympia and a 3A program from Seattle in the same pool, with boys and girls performances judged by the same reader community.

That format matters for mobilization. A family supporting a girls nominee is not voting in a girls-only contest — they are voting against every other nominee on the list, boys included. The community that organizes the broadest turnout wins, not the community whose athlete had the bigger game. It is the structural fact that separates this ballot from a gendered conference award.

The Feb 16–21, 2026 week illustrates the range further. Jalen Davis of Bremerton appeared for his second confirmed ballot, this time off a 29-point District 3 championship performance and a 27-point, 10-assist semifinal game. Bremerton is a 3A program in Kitsap County, across the Sound from Seattle — and Davis made a statewide ballot, competing in the same reader poll as players from Puget Sound's largest 4A schools. Classification stops mattering at the point of the poll.fm widget.

The confirmed nominees — and what they reveal about range

Four weeks of nominees are on the public record for the 2025–26 season. One winner is confirmed: Jordan Bennett of Emerald Ridge won the January 26–31 week. The other weeks' winners are not in the indexed record — VarsityWA announces by updating the original article title, which is not always captured by search indexing. Do not take the absence of other confirmed winners as evidence the poll did not run.

The March 4–7, 2026 ballot — state tournament week — is the sharpest look at what the field looks like at the end of the season. Herbie Wright of Prosser shot 22-of-32 from the floor, hit 6 three-pointers, finished with 57 points and 13 rebounds, and broke a school scoring record. Noelani Tupua of Lake Stevens scored a career-high 40 points and crossed 1,000 career points in the same week. Jackson Whitaker of Liberty (Issaquah, 3A) scored 43 points in a loser-out game against Seattle Prep and passed 2,000 career points. Jalen Davis appeared for a third time, averaging 24.7 points, 8.3 rebounds, 2.0 assists, and 3.3 steals across the state tournament games.

That is the ballot at its peak: multiple nominees whose performances are verifiably historic at the individual-school level, drawn from Yakima, the South Sound, the Eastside suburbs, and Kitsap County. A reader vote with that field is not decided by who had the better game — several of them had arguably the best game of their high school career that same week. It is decided by which community shows up between Monday and Friday noon.

Running a campaign when the window is five days

Friday noon is the only deadline that matters here. And Friday noon arrives before most supporters assume a weekly poll has even peaked.

The standard instinct for a fan-vote campaign — let the week develop, post on the weekend, rally Sunday night — does not apply. By Sunday the VarsityWA basketball ballot is closed. A community that waits for the natural rhythm of a week finds out on Friday that it ran out of time on Thursday.

What actually works: the group chat message that goes out Monday or Tuesday when the ballot first opens, before casual supporters have forgotten about it. The team page post on Wednesday when the ballot is still fresh and three days of voting remain. The reminder Thursday morning when Friday noon is close enough to feel real. That is the sequence. Not a late push — an early one.

The nomination piece matters too. Email varsitywanews@gmail.com or DM Todd Milles before 5 p.m. Sunday with the stat line and the opponent's name. A performance that nobody flags can be missed. Boesel's triple-double, Bierlink's 64-point overtime game, Wright's 57-point school record — those are the kind of lines that earn a spot on the ballot if the nomination reaches VarsityWA before Monday.

Because the ballot is open and the window is short, services like sports fan-poll vote support are designed for exactly this kind of compressed timeline — extending reach on Monday and Tuesday when the ballot is newest. For the general mechanics of weekly fan-vote campaigns, buy votes online covers the cadence; the how-to guide walks through the early-week activation sequence that matters most here. Washington's other fan-vote polls are at /usa/washington/ and the full national directory at /usa/.