Alabama High School Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two different 'Player of the Year' titles are running in Alabama right now

Ask ten people how Alabama's football Player of the Year gets picked and you'll get two different answers, both partly right. One is a public vote. The other isn't.

Sports Illustrated's High School on SI hub, built on SBLive's reporting infrastructure, runs a fan poll at si.com/high-school/alabama that lets readers vote for the season's top player. Separately, the Alabama Sports Writers Association compiles an All-State team through its own committee of writers and coaches, with no public ballot involved. Both wrap up around the same point in the calendar. Neither is a substitute for the other, and mixing them up is the single most common mistake a first-time visitor to this page makes.

That confusion isn't trivial if you're trying to help a program's player win something. Campaign energy aimed at a fan vote does nothing for a writers' committee, and vice versa. Knowing which one you're looking at, before you start sharing a link, is the actual starting point here, not a footnote. This page covers the football-specific fan vote; the wider Alabama High School Player of the Year hub explains how the same annual format runs across other sports too. For the general mechanics of how a statewide fan-vote award works once you've confirmed it's the right one, the online contest voting guide covers that ground.

What's actually confirmed about the SI/SBLive fan vote (and what isn't)

Here's the honest inventory. Confirmed: the poll is free, it's hosted on si.com/high-school/alabama, SBLive's Alabama staff runs it, and it happens once a year at the close of the football season. Not confirmed, at least not anywhere public: a fixed vote cap, exact open and close dates, and a searchable archive of past winners.

That last gap is the one that trips people up most. Unlike a results database you can filter by year, the High School on SI hub publishes its award coverage as dated articles: useful if you know roughly when to look, frustrating if you're trying to research three years of history in one sitting. The practical workaround is searching the site directly for "Alabama football player of the year" plus the season you're after, rather than expecting a single landing page to list every prior winner. The same annual format runs for other sports too, including the Baseball Player of the Year vote, each published as its own dated article rather than a shared archive.

None of that thinness makes the award less real. It just means anyone researching it (a parent, a booster, a reporter) has to work from the live page and dated coverage rather than a tidy summary table, which is exactly why this page exists.

How this fan vote differs from the weekly poll on the same hub

Same hub, same organizer, two different products. The weekly Player of the Week poll runs from roughly August through November, tracking one standout performer week by week across the football season. The Football Player of the Year vote is the once-a-year capstone, decided after the season wraps rather than after any single Friday night.

People land on this page looking for the annual award and end up voting in the wrong poll (or the reverse) because both live inside the same si.com/high-school/alabama section, sometimes on the same day's front page. The fix is simple: check the headline and the publish date on whatever post you're looking at before you click anything. A post titled around a specific week's performance is the weekly poll. A post framed around the full season is the annual one. The same weekly format runs in other sports too, including the Boys Basketball Player of the Week poll during the winter season.

The mechanics of casting a vote are the part that's straightforward. What's harder to pin down is timing. SBLive doesn't run this on a universal fixed date the way some statewide polls do; the article announcing the field is the actual clock. That's worth checking against the sibling Alabama Football Player of the Week page if you're not sure which poll a shared link points to.

Statewide classifications, one ballot: how AHSAA structure shows up here

The AHSAA sorts its football membership into seven classifications, 1A through 7A, based on enrollment, plus a network of regions and conferences beneath that. The Football Player of the Year field draws from across that entire structure. SBLive's coverage isn't limited to one classification tier or one region of the state.

What that means in practice: a nominee's classification doesn't gate them out of contention, and the award isn't split into seven separate class-by-class prizes the way some state associations run it. One statewide field, one vote. Whether turnout skews toward larger-classification programs with bigger alumni networks or smaller programs with tighter community ties isn't something the public record settles. SBLive doesn't publish a raw vote count by school or class, so any claim about which classification "usually wins" would be a guess dressed up as a fact. Better to say plainly: it isn't confirmed.

What is worth knowing is that this same classification structure shows up across the rest of Alabama's SBLive-run polls: the Athlete of the Week program pulls from the identical seven-class, all-region pool, just on a weekly cycle instead of an annual one.

If you're trying to help a nominee, here's what actually applies

Because no vote cap is published for this specific award, the safer assumption is the conservative one: treat whatever the live poll page states for the current cycle as final, rather than whatever a previous year's ballot happened to allow. Automated or scripted voting sits outside SBLive's rules across its network, and that doesn't change just because this particular ballot's cap isn't spelled out here.

Inside those rules, the lever that consistently works is reach, not repetition from one device. A booster club, a team group chat, an alumni list. Getting the actual poll link (not just a mention of the player's name) in front of more real people beats one person voting obsessively from a single phone. Alabama's football alumni and booster networks run deep in this state; a program that activates its supporters early, once the field is announced, has more runway than one that starts the week the poll is set to close.

Where organic reach runs out and a program wants more structured outreach without stepping outside the rules, services built for statewide sports polls exist. See structured fan-poll vote support or the broader award-vote support option for polls like this one. The distinction that matters, per most organizers' actual terms, is real human votes arriving steadily over time versus scripted, rapid-fire submissions. Read more on that line at is buying votes legal before choosing a service.