California High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Tustin over the Trinity League — what Essis's win confirms

Eimesse Essis of Tustin HS won the California Football Player of the Week for October 17–19, 2024 — a running back from a school that shares a CIF Southern Section with Mater Dei, St. John Bosco, and Servite, but carries none of their national broadcast footprint. Not one of those three programs claimed that week's ballot.

That result is structural. A statewide ballot with 26 to 34 nominees does not sort itself by school prestige or enrollment. It sorts by organised turnout. The Trinity League programs carry large, passionate fan bases — but large bases spread across multiple social networks, alumni channels, and parent groups are not automatically faster to move than a smaller, tighter community that hears about a nomination for the first time and treats it as its one shot. Tustin winning is evidence that the ballot works the way fan votes are supposed to work: the school that activates its people completely in the Monday window beats the school that assumes its name is enough.

And there is no per-vote limit here to constrain the gap. SI's own language acknowledges that thousands of votes for one athlete are expected and normal, which means the contest really is a function of how many real people you reach. One device grinding votes does less work than three hundred people voting twice. The math is about width, not depth.

That is the frame for everything that follows. The CIF section breakdown, the recurring nominees, the nomination process — all of it is downstream of one question: which community moves first and most completely before 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Monday.

One ballot, nine sections — what the confirmed field actually looks like

Three 2024 ballot weeks are on record from si.com. Read the table against the section column, not just the name column — that is where the real structure shows.

Across those three weeks, Central Section programs — Clovis East, Hanford (appearing twice), Sanger, Wasco — earned as many confirmed nominations as the entire Trinity League combined. Count them: four Central Section appearances across three ballot weeks. That is not an accident of scheduling.

The Fresno metro runs its own football culture, independent of the Southern Section spotlight, and it converts into ballot presence when a player earns the nomination. Brady Smigiel (Newbury Park, QB) and Thomas Donovan (Grossmont, QB) each appeared in multiple consecutive 2024 weeks. That pattern tells you something real: a school community that built the habit of voting once does not have to rebuild it from scratch the second time. The share link is already saved. The group chats already know the drill.

The Trinity League factor — and why it is not the whole story

Any serious California prep football conversation starts here, because the Trinity League is where it has to. Mater Dei entered the 2025 season ranked number one nationally by multiple services. St. John Bosco had back-to-back national titles before that. Servite rounds out a Trinity League whose Friday nights in Orange County draw scouts from across the country. All three schools feed into the CIF Southern Section, and their nominees appear on the statewide ballot regularly enough that a week without a Trinity League name is notable.

But elite on the field does not automatically mean elite in a Monday night voting window. St. John Bosco's Koa Malau'ulu was on the Oct 3–5 ballot alongside three Central Section players. Servite's Quaid Carr was on the Sept 26–28 ballot alongside a quarterback from Enterprise HS in Redding and a running back from Half Moon Bay. Neither week's confirmed outcome shows a Trinity League sweep.

The CIF section breakdown matters less as a hierarchy and more as a map of where fan vote energy is concentrated. Southern Section has volume and name recognition — but that volume spreads across hundreds of programs and dozens of league rivalries. The Central Section has tight community geography in the Fresno area: Sanger, Hanford, and Wasco each appeared across three confirmed ballot weeks, and those towns are compact enough that a coach sending a single text to the parent group reaches nearly everyone who matters. NorCal sections — North Coast, Sac-Joaquin, Northern — produce nominees regularly but face the longest organisational distance from a statewide vote that closes Monday night Pacific.

Running a real California campaign before Monday night

Two things decide a week here: getting your player nominated, and reaching enough people before 11:59 p.m. Monday.

Nominations go to [email protected] or via @sbliveca on social media. The submission that arrives Saturday night or Sunday morning — with the athlete's name, school, CIF section, position, full stat line, opponent, and score — gives editors what they need before they finalize that week's field. A great Friday performance that nobody flags can be missed. The full California contest directory at /usa/california/ lists every active SI-style regional ballot in the state, if you want to track what other California communities are running simultaneously; the national directory at /usa/ covers comparable weekly polls across every other state. The nomination is not a formality. It is step one.

Once the ballot is live, the structural reality of this poll is worth understanding plainly. SI's platform states that thousands of votes for a single athlete are expected and normal; the only prohibition is automated scripts. The contests that are won here are won by reach, not by one device running long. The school that sends the link to three hundred people who each vote twice beats the school that has five people who each vote a hundred times.

What that reach looks like depends on the community's specific topology. A Trinity League school in Anaheim or Santa Ana has deep alumni networks in Southern California and social accounts with tens of thousands of followers who care about football — the work there is cutting through the noise of a fan base that hears about nominations regularly. A Central Section school in the Fresno metro — Sanger, Hanford, Wasco — is operating a tighter geography where a single coach text to the parent group can reach nearly everyone who matters in one message. A North Coast school in the Bay Area has committed local fans but faces a structural challenge: statewide voter awareness of programs in Marin or Sonoma counties runs lower than awareness of Southern Section names, which means the campaign has to work harder to pull votes from outside its immediate community. Neither structure is inherently better; each requires different execution before the Monday deadline.

For campaigns that want a structured push beyond organic reach, our vote promotion service supplements community efforts on open public ballots like this one. The complete voting guide walks through the weekly cadence that applies across all SI-style fan polls — supplementing a school community's organic outreach when the Monday window is closing.