Single Word Requests – Word for Someone Famous to a Small Group

fractious

1(typically of children) irritable and quarrelsome: ‘they fight and squabble like fractious children’

1.1 (of a group or organization) difficult to control; unruly: ‘King Malcolm struggled to unite his fractious kingdom’

‘After going backwards at the election and losing ground in opinion polls since, Opposition MPs are cranky, fractious and looking for answers.’

Oxford Living Dictionaries, Fractious. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fractious

Fractious can describe individual people, but more often describes a group or an organization.

This process of selection has come to be known colloquially as a draft

draft noun

12. a selection or drawing of persons, by lot or otherwise, from the general body of the people for military service; levy; conscription.

13. the persons so selected.

14. Sports. a selecting or drawing of new players from a choice group of amateur players by professional teams, especially a system of selecting new players so that each team in a professional league receives some of the most promising players.

_{Source: dictionary.com}

As the definition list implies, the term originated from a general sense of drawing from a source or pool, adopted into military duties and service and migrated into the common lexicon for sports. Consider the Kontinental Hokey League Draft, the National Basketball Association Draft and many other sports leagues. It has also been adopted as terminology as a game mechanic.

You can rework to your example as:

The girls in class conducted a popularity draft of all boys in class by selecting the most popular boy at a time until none were left.

_{This was essentially the plot of South Park season 11 episode 14 The List, November 14, 2007.}

As Clare mentioned in the first comment, drafting is a formal process for basically picking teams.