WALA FOX10 First & 10 Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

One Mobile Friday night, two entirely separate ballots

Mobile has two TV stations running weekly high school football fan votes, and neither one is the statewide poll. FOX10's First & 10 Player of the Week, sponsored by Rich's Car Wash, sits on its own standing page at fox10tv.com/sports/first-and-10/player-of-the-week/. It has nothing to do with the High School on SI / SBLive Alabama ballot that lives on si.com/high-school/alabama, and it isn't the same as WKRG's own version either. Three separate votes can run in the same market in the same week. A player named to more than one carries three unrelated campaigns, not one.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Someone searching "vote for [my team] player of the week" in Mobile could land on any of the three and assume it's the only game in town. It isn't. FOX10's version is the one branded by Rich's Car Wash, run on a page the station reuses all season rather than publishing fresh, and it's the one that ends, months after the last regular-season snap, at an annual spring banquet. That banquet detail alone separates it from a poll that simply names a winner and moves on. The 2025 edition happened May 13, 2025 — well clear of football season.

None of this changes how a supporter actually votes. It changes where they click, and it changes which deadline they're tracking. For the wider picture of how these weekly TV-station ballots operate across Alabama, the statewide SI/SBLive football poll page covers the version FOX10's isn't.

What the standing page tells you, and what it doesn't

FOX10 built First & 10 around one permanent URL instead of a new post every Friday. That's a real usability choice, not a small one. A bookmarked link works all season without a supporter needing to hunt for that week's specific headline, which is a genuine advantage over a poll buried inside a dated article. The tradeoff: the same permanence means an old screenshot or a stale share link can quietly point people at a closed round, since the page's content changes underneath the same address.

What the page does not do, at least on the record available here, is publish a running vote count or a winning margin for individual weeks. So a campaign built around this ballot is working without a scoreboard. The organizer's anti-fraud language is similarly light on the standing page — the expectation is real visitors casting real votes, without the kind of explicit bot-and-script prohibition some sibling polls spell out in detail. Read the live page before assuming either way. General mechanics for this style of standing, station-run fan poll are covered separately, since the same reused-URL pattern shows up on other TV-station ballots too.

Rich's Car Wash's sponsorship is the other fixed point. It's a Mobile-based business, and its name on the vote page is part of what makes First & 10 recognizable as its own program rather than a generic "player of the week" slot any station could run. That branding, plus the banquet capstone, is the identity.

Mobile Bay's three-county football map, and the spring banquet arc

FOX10's coverage radius pulls from Mobile County, Baldwin County, and Washington County programs, a three-county football map that runs from dense Mobile-city programs out to smaller Washington County schools. A nominee from any of those counties lands on the same weekly ballot, and school-specific outreach, an athletic department's own account, a county sports page, a booster group, tends to reach real voters faster than a broad, undirected push across the whole market.

Then there's the calendar gap most first-time supporters miss entirely. A weekly win in October doesn't conclude anything by itself. FOX10 gathers every season winner for an annual spring banquet, the 2025 date was May 13, 2025, which means the full arc of a single season's recognition runs from the first Friday night of fall football clear through the following May. Anyone building a case for a nominee's local profile, a scholarship application, a school news release, should know that the banquet, not the weekly vote result, is the program's actual closing chapter.

Other Alabama fan-vote programs and their own mechanics sit at the Alabama contest hub, alongside the state's multi-sport Athlete of the Week and Player of the Year tracking. The full national directory is at the USA contest index, and general open-ballot campaign mechanics are covered in the online vote-buying guide.