Louisiana High School Boys Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What exactly is the Louisiana High School Boys Basketball Player of the Year vote?

Every spring, after the LHSAA state basketball tournament concludes at the Alario Center or Burton Coliseum, SBLive Sports — the national prep network embedded within Sports Illustrated's High School on SI platform — publishes a boys basketball Player of the Year fan poll at si.com/high-school/louisiana. The poll is boys-basketball-specific: unlike the general Louisiana High School Player of the Year series (which spans football, softball, and all other sports), this award is entirely dedicated to the winter hardwood season and the athletes who defined it class by class.

• Produced by SBLive Sports, the national high school sports network operating under the Sports Illustrated / The Arena Group umbrella since 2021.
• Covers all five LHSAA classification levels — Classes 1A through 5A — with a separate poll per class, so a Class 2A standout competes only against Class 2A peers.
• Nominees are chosen by SBLive's Louisiana editorial team based on the completed winter season: per-game averages, team record, state-tournament performance, and LSWA all-state recognition.
• Voting is free at si.com/high-school/louisiana, requires no login or personal data, and runs until 11:59 p.m. PT on the date posted in the poll article.
• The fan vote is separate from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association (LSWA) all-state teams and the Louisiana Farm Bureau Insurance / LSWA Mr. Basketball award — the state's most prestigious individual basketball honour, awarded editorially to the top senior statewide regardless of class.
• A player earning the SBLive fan-vote title and the LSWA Mr. Basketball in the same year is a rare double — Ahmad Hudson of Ruston High School achieved both in 2026.

Which Louisiana schools and players have won this award?

Louisiana boys basketball POY history reflects the state's two dominant basketball corridors: the Baton Rouge public-school magnet pipeline (Scotlandville, Liberty Magnet, Madison Prep) and the statewide independent and Catholic school circuit (Dunham, Newman, St. Augustine, Hannan). The LSWA Mr. Basketball award — the closest year-round precedent to a statewide boys basketball POY — offers the most complete historical record, with Baton Rouge-area schools claiming the honour in six of the ten years from 2017 through 2026.

Scotlandville Magnet High School in north Baton Rouge is the state's most decorated programme in this era of Louisiana boys basketball — Javonte Smart won LSWA Mr. Basketball in back-to-back years for the Hornets before going on to LSU, and Reece Beekman won it again for Scotlandville in 2020 before starring at Virginia. The SBLive fan-vote series covers the same universe of elite prospects by class, with Class 5A polls typically drawing the largest nominee pools from the Baton Rouge–New Orleans corridor.

For the Class 2A–3A range, Madison Prep Academy (Baton Rouge) and the Dunham School have supplied consistent nominees — Madison Prep in particular has built a pipeline of Division I guards that rivals any small-school programme in the South. Peabody Magnet in Alexandria anchors the Class 4A field from central Louisiana.

How does the SI.com Louisiana Boys Basketball Player of the Year vote work?

The mechanics differ from newspaper polls like weekly athlete-of-the-week contests. There is no hourly vote cap — anyone with a browser can cast multiple votes across the window without waiting for a cooldown timer to reset. The poll lives inside a dedicated article on si.com/high-school/louisiana; the SBLive editorial team embeds the ballot, lists the nominees with their stats and school, and displays a live vote tally throughout the window.

For a broader explanation of how online sports fan polls work and what drives vote totals, see our complete online voting guide.

1. SBLive editors publish the poll article — usually within two to four weeks after the LHSAA state tournament finals — with four to eight nominees per classification.
2. Each nominee entry shows the athlete's name, school, class, and key season stats so readers can assess performance before voting.
3. Click your athlete's name or the radio button next to it, then submit. Live totals update immediately and are visible to all visitors.
4. Return to the same article URL and vote again — there is no hourly cap, so additional votes can be cast in a single session or across multiple visits before the 11:59 p.m. PT deadline.
5. After the deadline passes, SBLive publishes a winner announcement article naming the top vote-getter in each class as the Louisiana Boys Basketball Player of the Year for that classification.

Because there is no per-vote cooldown, the competitive dynamic favours campaigns that can sustain a high repeat-voting rate across the full window — not just a one-time mobilisation push. A programme with an organised, engaged booster network that stays active for the full duration of the poll consistently outperforms one that fires a single burst of votes on day one.

How do Louisiana boys basketball campaigns build winning vote totals?

Boys basketball fan-vote campaigns in Louisiana have a structural advantage over football or softball polls: the basketball booster community is tightly concentrated — five to eight families per programme do the majority of the organising, and the HBCU-pipeline culture at Baton Rouge magnet schools like Scotlandville and Liberty Magnet produces alumni engagement that extends well beyond current students. The tactics below are calibrated to this specific market.

Network-by-network breakdown for Louisiana boys basketball

The absence of an hourly cap changes the arithmetic compared to polls like the weekly Athlete of the Week. Instead of one vote per device per hour, supporters can cast multiple votes in quick succession from the same device. This means campaigns that keep their networks engaged throughout the entire window — with daily reminders rather than a single push — accumulate vote totals that single-burst campaigns cannot catch late in the window.

For campaigns where the organic network has been fully mobilised and a gap remains, some families use a paid vote promotion service to reach additional real voters. If you go that route, use one that delivers genuine, paced votes — our sports fan poll service is structured around natural-looking delivery patterns. Read the poll's current terms at si.com/high-school/louisiana before using any external service. Full guidance on vote-getting strategy for online polls is at our how-to hub.

What are the rules — and can you buy votes for this Louisiana basketball poll?

The SBLive / High School on SI poll platform does not list a formal public rulebook on-page the way a sweepstakes contest does — but the standard terms for the underlying poll software typically prohibit automated scripts, bot networks, and bulk VPN-rotated traffic designed to simulate human voting at scale. The Louisiana Boys Basketball Player of the Year poll carries no cash prize, no scholarship, and no LHSAA eligibility consequence — it is a media recognition award, not a regulated athletic competition.

There is a practical distinction worth understanding:

• Automated scripts and bot networks — software that fires hundreds or thousands of votes per minute from the same device fingerprint or IP range. These are detectable by platform-level traffic analysis and typically result in vote removal.
• Real human voters reached through paid promotion — actual people casting votes from their own devices at a natural rate. Structurally this is the same as a booster club email reaching two hundred more families — it is real fans voting, reached through a paid channel rather than a personal contact list.

Whether paid real-voter outreach satisfies the intent of any specific poll's terms is a judgement each campaign must make after reading the current official poll page. Given that this award carries no prize and sits outside the LHSAA's formal eligibility structure, the risk is reputational rather than legal or athletic. For a balanced overview of how online vote-buying works and what the real risks are, see our full guide.

Louisiana boys basketball season timeline and LHSAA state tournament schedule

The SBLive Boys Basketball Player of the Year poll is keyed to the LHSAA winter sports calendar. Louisiana's boys basketball season runs from November through the state tournament in late February or early March — one of the South's more compressed winter schedules — and the fan poll launches within two to four weeks of the final buzzer at the state championship venue.

The state tournament venue matters for community context. The Burton Coliseum in Lake Charles has historically hosted the LHSAA's larger-class championships, drawing fans from across the state for a multi-day event where Baton Rouge programmes like Scotlandville, Liberty Magnet, and Madison Prep travel west and compete in front of large, vocal crowds. That tournament atmosphere directly feeds post-season fan energy — athletes who perform in the final rounds of the state tournament tend to generate the most grassroots voting momentum in the weeks immediately after.

A player who wins a state championship, earns LSWA all-state honours, and then leads the SBLive fan vote becomes a triple-crown recipient — one of the most complete individual basketball seasons a Louisiana prep player can assemble. For context on other Louisiana prep contests and statewide recognition programmes, visit the Louisiana high school contests hub or the broader USA contest directory.