Iowa Class 1A Girls Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Iowa's smallest girls class: what Class 1A means for this award

When High School on SI names an Iowa Class 1A Girls Basketball Player of the Year, it is recognising the top player in the IGHSAU's smallest girls basketball classification. Iowa girls basketball operates under the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union — the IGHSAU — which is entirely separate from the IHSAA that governs boys sports. Girls basketball uses five classes from 1A (smallest) to 5A (largest). Class 1A sits at the base of that structure.

The scale difference between Class 1A and the larger classes is significant. Class 1A schools serve the smallest communities in Iowa, many of them rural consolidated programmes with graduating classes of a few dozen students. The programme identities at this level are often built over many years, and state tournament appearances carry outsized meaning compared to what they might represent at a larger school.

Confirmed award data: winners and state champions

The table below reflects every result confirmed in the available facts for the Iowa Class 1A Girls Basketball Player of the Year. No unverified nominees, stat lines, or historical winners appear here.

Rowan Jacobi's 2025-26 award ties Springville — a small community in Linn County in eastern Iowa — to the Class 1A girls basketball award. St. Albert's 2024-25 state championship represents the Council Bluffs area in western Iowa, demonstrating that Class 1A competitive excellence spans both ends of the state geographically.

What the two confirmed programmes share

Both Springville and St. Albert are confirmed in the Class 1A girls basketball record through distinct paths — one as award winner, one as state champion. Both represent Iowa communities that lie outside the metro areas where the larger IGHSAU classes cluster. That geographic spread is a feature of Class 1A: small-school basketball success is distributed across rural Iowa, not concentrated in any single region.

Ballot mechanics for Iowa Girls Class 1A

The available facts confirm a specific detail about the Class 1A girls basketball ballot that differs from some other Iowa basketball classes: a separate Girls 1A preseason class vote is not confirmed. For the larger girls classes, facts confirm preseason ballots running in November or December. For Girls 1A, the confirmed data point is the 2025-26 end-of-season award — the editorial recognition that SI announces after the March state tournament.

This means campaign planning for Class 1A girls should anchor on the finalist or end-of-season ballot, not assume a November or December preseason article will appear every year. Supporters should check si.com/high-school/iowa early in the season to see whether a Class 1A girls preseason ballot has been published, but should not plan their campaign around one if it has not been confirmed.

The unlimited-vote mechanic

Across all Iowa basketball SI ballots, the confirmed vote format is open unlimited voting with share-to-amplify encouraged. No per-hour or per-device cap appears in the facts record. For Class 1A girls, where the finalist field is small and community networks are concentrated, sustained submission across the full window is the practical advantage of the unlimited format. A family or school that starts voting the day the article goes live and returns daily until the close accumulates far more votes than one that votes once.

Springville and St. Albert: programme context

Two programmes appear in the confirmed facts for the Iowa Class 1A Girls Basketball Player of the Year. Their stories reflect what Class 1A success looks like across Iowa's small-school basketball landscape.

Springville — 2025-26 award school

Springville is a small eastern Iowa community in Linn County, northeast of Cedar Rapids. The programme competes as the Orioles. Rowan Jacobi's 2025-26 Player of the Year award marks Springville's confirmed appearance in the Class 1A girls basketball award record. Small eastern Iowa programmes in Linn County have access to a regional sports media environment that gives award-winning players modest regional visibility beyond their own immediate community.

St. Albert — 2024-25 state champion

St. Albert is a Catholic school in Council Bluffs, a city on the Missouri River border with Nebraska in western Iowa. The school is named after a patron of natural science and arts and competes in the IGHSAU Class 1A bracket. The 2024-25 state championship — won at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines — represents a round trip of several hours from Council Bluffs, which is a common experience for western Iowa Class 1A teams travelling to the state tournament. Catholic programmes in Iowa's smaller classes have produced consistent individual and team recognition across several sports.

For broader Iowa prep sports navigation, the Iowa high school sports hub links to sibling pages across girls basketball classes 2A through 5A and the four Iowa boys basketball classes. The USA contests index provides state-by-state discovery for fans searching awards beyond Iowa.

Wells Fargo Arena and the Iowa girls basketball calendar

Every IGHSAU girls basketball class ends its season at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. For Class 1A, that means a March state tournament brackets the end of the campaign season and the editorial decision window for the SI award. A team like St. Albert, which won the 2024-25 Class 1A girls title at the arena, represents the endpoint that every Class 1A programme and its supporters work toward through the winter season.

The Iowa girls basketball calendar shares the Des Moines venue with the IHSAA boys basketball classes, but each gender's governing body — IGHSAU for girls, IHSAA for boys — runs its own separate state tournament bracket at the arena. The Class 1A girls bracket is typically one of the earliest girls classes to compete, which can affect when the SI editorial announcement appears relative to the other girls classes.

Running a Class 1A girls basketball vote campaign

Class 1A represents the smallest community scale in Iowa girls basketball. A school like Springville in eastern Linn County or St. Albert in Council Bluffs draws from a tight supporter base where most community members know the player and her family directly. That familiarity is the campaign's greatest asset and its greatest constraint simultaneously: the ceiling on organic supporters is lower than at larger classes, but the response rate to a personal ask is much higher.

Unlike the Class 4A or Class 5A campaigns that might target hundreds of booster contacts in a suburban school district, a Class 1A campaign should start with a few dozen people who care most and work outward from there. A message from a parent, coach, or the player herself — attached to the exact SI article link — will convert at a much higher rate than a broad untargeted social post.

Extending reach beyond the immediate community

When organic outreach from the immediate Class 1A community has been fully deployed, the gap between a well-organised rival school and a smaller or less connected programme can be meaningful in an unlimited-vote format. In those situations, sports fan poll vote packages provide supplemental volume that is operationally compatible with the open SI ballot format. Before using any service, read the active rules at si.com/high-school/iowa. For step-by-step timing guidance, see our voting strategy guide and the buy votes online overview.

Class 1A in the full Iowa girls basketball award structure

The Iowa Class 1A Girls Basketball Player of the Year is the smallest-class tier in High School on SI's five-class Iowa girls basketball award system. It runs alongside separate awards for Classes 2A, 3A, 4A, and 5A — each with its own ballot and editorial decision. The Class 1A award recognises excellence at a specific level of the IGHSAU classification structure, not the top player across all classes.

The statewide overall Iowa Girls Basketball Player of the Year — which spans all five IGHSAU classes — is a separate editorial recognition. In 2025-26 that award went to Jenica Lewis of Johnston, who also won the Class 5A award. Rowan Jacobi's Class 1A award is a parallel but independent recognition for the 1A tier. The two awards exist within the same SI framework but are judged by different criteria at different classification scales.

Beyond SI awards, Class 1A players can earn IGHSAU all-state recognition and — in exceptional cases — statewide awards like the Gatorade Iowa Girls Basketball Player of the Year. Each of those is independently adjudicated. Winning the Class 1A SI fan vote does not confer automatic eligibility or preference for those separate honours.

For navigation across Iowa's full girls basketball award landscape and other Iowa high school sports, the Iowa contest hub provides links to sibling class pages and related sports awards. The national USA contests index allows state-by-state discovery for fans tracking high school sports recognition across the country.