Maryland High School Girls Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Maryland High School Girls Basketball Player of the Year award?

The Maryland High School Girls Basketball Player of the Year is an annual statewide fan-voted honour administered by High School on SI, the prep-sports vertical of Sports Illustrated running under the Arena Group's SBLive Sports platform. The ballot sweeps across all of Maryland girls basketball — MPSSAA (Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association) public schools in Classes 4A through 1A, and IAAM (Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland) private schools in the A, B, and C conferences.

• Published at si.com/high-school/maryland — SI's statewide Maryland prep-sports hub.
• Nominees span both governing bodies: MPSSAA public and IAAM private, making this one of the few statewide fan polls that crosses the public-private divide in Maryland girls basketball.
• The ballot typically drops in late March or early April, shortly after the MPSSAA state championships and IAAM championship games conclude — capturing peak post-season fan attention.
• Vote cap: once per IP address per day; no account, email, or registration needed.
• Voting closes on a Sunday evening, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, as specified in each year's ballot article on SI.com.
• The 2025-26 poll named Kaylah Tchoufa of Walt Whitman High School the winner — the Montgomery County senior averaged 17.8 points and 10.3 rebounds per game and led Whitman to the MPSSAA 4A girls basketball state championship.

Who are the recent Maryland Girls Basketball POY vote winners and nominees?

High School on SI has run Maryland sport-specific Player of the Year votes since the early 2020s. The girls basketball ballot reflects standout performers from both the IAAM and MPSSAA during each winter season. The table below draws from confirmed SI.com ballot articles, Gatorade Player of the Year announcements, and regional media award records — every entry is a real, verifiable player.

Confirmed nominees and award recipients — recent seasons

The St. Frances vs. McDonogh rivalry is the defining fixture in Maryland girls basketball. St. Frances Academy, located in northeast Baltimore, plays nationally and recruits college-calibre talent from across the region; McDonogh School in Owings Mills mirrors that national outlook with an affluent suburban alumni base and strong private-school athletics infrastructure. Their annual IAAM A Conference matchups regularly draw the top Maryland girls basketball talent into the SI POY conversation.

Which Maryland schools and conferences define the Girls Basketball POY ballot?

Maryland girls basketball runs through two distinct governing structures, each with different competitive formats, geographic footprints, and talent pipelines. Both feed the SI POY ballot.

IAAM private schools — the national-schedule tier

MPSSAA public schools — the statewide depth tier

The MPSSAA organises girls basketball across Classes 4A through 1A in eight regions. Montgomery County and Prince George's County dominate the 4A classification; Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County produce consistent state-qualifier programmes. Walt Whitman's Kaylah Tchoufa winning the 2025-26 SI fan vote as a public-school 4A player shows that the MPSSAA bracket can and does beat IAAM nominees in the open fan vote — a reflection of Montgomery County's demographic depth and social-media mobilisation capacity.

MPSSAA Girls Basketball POY nominees in recent ballot cycles have included players from Gaithersburg, C.H. Flowers, and Eastern Technical High School — programmes with high enrolments and active athletic booster communities across central and suburban Maryland.

How does the Maryland Girls Basketball Player of the Year vote work?

High School on SI publishes the ballot as a dedicated article at si.com/high-school/maryland, typically in late March once the MPSSAA state tournaments and IAAM championship games have wrapped. Each nominee receives a line entry with their school, key season statistics, and relevant award context; an embedded poll widget allows readers to vote directly on the article page.

The vote cap is one vote per IP address per day — different from the hourly-cap format used by newspaper polls. Home broadband and a cellular data connection register as separate IP addresses, giving each device in a household a daily vote of its own. The sustained daily rhythm of this format favours consistent multi-day outreach over a single peak-day push. For a broader explanation of how online high school sports polls work across platforms, see our complete guide to online voting contests.

The poll close date and time are stated in the ballot article. For the 2025-26 Maryland girls basketball POY cycle, SI.com published a Sunday, April 12 deadline at 11:59 p.m. PT. Live vote totals are visible throughout the window — supporters can check standings mid-vote and adjust their outreach intensity as needed.

Girls Basketball POY season timeline — when does the Maryland vote happen?

The Maryland Girls Basketball Player of the Year vote sits at the far end of the winter sports season. Understanding where it falls in the Maryland girls basketball calendar helps supporters plan their nomination and fan-mobilisation efforts well in advance.

The window between the MPSSAA state tournament and the SI poll close is narrow — roughly three to four weeks. Families and supporters who want to mobilise effectively should be prepared to share the direct ballot link within hours of it going live, since the daily vote cap means early engagement in week one compounds across the full window.

Winter is the only season this poll runs. Unlike the Cincinnati Enquirer's weekly all-sport format, the Maryland Girls Basketball POY is a single annual event specific to the girls basketball winter season. There is no separate summer poll or rolling weekly version — the entire year's recognition hinges on this one end-of-season vote.

How do you build votes for Maryland Girls Basketball Player of the Year?

Because the vote cap resets once per day — not hourly — the campaign structure here differs fundamentally from weekly newspaper polls. A daily reminder strategy over a 7-to-10-day window outperforms any single high-intensity push. Maryland girls basketball has its own distinct mobilisation channels that consistently convert in this format.

Maryland girls basketball sits at the intersection of two large metro markets — Baltimore and Washington DC — connected by the I-95 corridor. AAU and club programs like Team Thrill, DC Assault, and Maryland-based EYBL affiliates weave together families from Baltimore City, Prince George's County, Montgomery County, and Anne Arundel County in a single dense social network. When a player's travel-ball community activates for a POY vote alongside the school network, the combined reach regularly exceeds what the school alone could deliver.

When all organic channels have been worked and the margin is still tight in the final days of voting, some families use paid audience promotion to reach additional real voters. If you go that route, choose a service that delivers paced, genuine votes aligned to the daily cap — bulk delivery that exceeds the platform's expected daily pattern is the behaviour the IP-rate-limiting system is designed to catch. Our sports fan poll votes service is structured around cap-matched daily delivery. For the broader context on what paid vote promotion is and how it works across online polls, see our full guide and the Maryland contest hub.

Rules and the buy-votes question for this award

The Maryland Girls Basketball POY is a reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize and no formal sweepstakes structure under Maryland prize-promotion law. The applicable restrictions are those stated in the poll article at SI.com — primarily prohibitions on automated tools that manipulate the IP-based vote cap. For the broad picture on legality across online contest polls, see our full guide; the notes below focus on this specific format.

The practical distinction that matters for this poll:

• Automated scripts / VPN rotation at scale — rapid cycling through IP addresses to multiply votes beyond what genuine human devices would produce. This pattern is what IP-rate-limiting detects and removes.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people on their own devices, each casting one vote per day via their own IP. Structurally identical to a booster newsletter reaching hundreds of families who then choose to vote — it is fan voting reached through a paid channel.

Whether that distinction satisfies the spirit of any specific contest terms is a call each family and booster should make after reading the current ballot article. The stakes here are reputational — a published SI.com credential that surfaces in recruiting searches — not financial. Weigh that honestly against the recognition value before using any external service.