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

Malik Leonard went 26-of-30 for 435 yards — and still had company on the ballot

That is the clearest single fact about what South Florida football is: in October 2025, Malik Leonard of Chaminade-Madonna completed 26 of 30 passes for 435 yards and five touchdowns, and Kamary Cooper of South Plantation ran for 186 yards and four touchdowns on ten carries — in the same week. Both performances earned ballot nominations. Neither diluted the other's claim. The talent density across Miami-Dade and Broward counties is the structural fact that shapes every week of this poll.

Three months later, in the December state championship round, the same dynamic ran in a different direction. Johnny DiSalvatore hit five field goals in a 29-0 state title win for St. Thomas Aquinas — and the ballot included him alongside Neimann Lawrence's 381-yard passing night for Miami Northwestern, Leon Strawder's dual-threat game for American Heritage, and Derrek Cooper's two-touchdown carry game for Chaminade-Madonna. Four programs across two counties, all in the championship round, all on the same list. A kicker and three offensive players on the same nomination slate is not unusual for a region where the SI desk has enough qualified performances to choose from every week.

The practical implication runs through everything below: because the talent pool is this wide, the ballot almost always has multiple nominees from programs with serious organized alumni bases. The week a Miami-Dade public-school powerhouse and a nationally known Catholic private program are on the same list is not an anomaly — it is a normal South Florida week. Understanding which community type your nominee is drawing on is the first thing a real campaign figures out.

The private-school alumni chain and the diaspora network — two very different mobilization structures

Miami-Dade and Broward are not just big markets — they hold two types of community network that operate differently from each other, and from almost every other regional poll in the SI system. Knowing which type your nominee draws on changes when you start, how you spread the link, and what Sunday evening looks like.

The private-school programs — Chaminade-Madonna, St. Thomas Aquinas, American Heritage, Cardinal Gibbons — graduate players who land at Power Four programs across the country. A former Chaminade-Madonna player now in Atlanta or New York still has a group chat, still follows the Lions, and will vote if someone puts the link in front of them. That out-of-market reach is a structural advantage. A booster club email that goes to current families is the base; an alumni chain that goes to graduates now in other states is the multiplier. Running both from the moment the article posts — not from Saturday, but the day the ballot goes live — is the structural difference between a good campaign and a winning one for these programs.

For Miami-Dade public-school nominees — Miami Northwestern, Miami Central, Miami Columbus — the mechanism is different. When Neimann Lawrence threw for 381 yards in a championship-week game for Miami Northwestern, the people who activated behind that ballot nomination were not just Northwestern students and parents. They were a community for whom the school is a generational anchor — Haitian, Cuban, Caribbean, and Central American networks that operate through church groups, cultural organizations, and extended-family chains extending beyond Florida. Those chains move fast when there is something concrete to do: a link, a name, a Sunday-night deadline. The link has to reach the right node in the network early enough that it can spread before the close at 2:59 a.m. Eastern.

Across both types, a Sunday-evening reminder to every active group carries the most weight of the week. By that point, anyone who has already voted once will vote again if the link is directly in front of them and the deadline is visible. The window between Sunday afternoon and 11:59 p.m. Pacific is where South Florida races close. For campaigns that have done the organic outreach and want to extend their reach further, vote support options exist for polls of this format.

What the confirmed 2025 nominees reveal

The 2025 season produced confirmed nominees from August through the December state championship round — one of the longer continuous runs of any regional POTW poll in Florida. The data across those weeks is worth examining together, not just week by week.

Three patterns come through across those weeks. First, the ballot reaches specialists: DiSalvatore's five-field-goal state title game earned a spot because South Florida championships are high-stakes enough that a kicker's contribution in a 29-0 shutout is recognized as decisive — that is not a given on every regional poll in the country. Second, the gap between Leonard's 435-yard passing game and Cooper's 186-yard, four-touchdown rushing game landing on the same ballot in the same week tells you how wide the talent spread is. Third, three of the eight confirmed nominees came from Chaminade-Madonna or St. Thomas Aquinas — programs that appear early in the season, deep in the season, and in the state championship round. Their presence is consistent, not opportunistic.

When Chaminade-Madonna or St. Thomas Aquinas has an athlete on the ballot, they start with the structural advantages described above. When neither program is represented — or when a public-school nominee faces a thinner field — the race is more open than the school names alone suggest.

Mechanics and the Sunday timeline

The mechanics of this poll are simple and the deadline is specific. The same unlimited-vote, no-account format runs across the SI Florida football POTW system, but the South Florida ballot has its own nominee field and its own winner — it is not combined with the Central Florida, Tampa Bay, or Northeast Florida regional polls that run on the same Sunday schedule.

The Sunday-night close lands two hours ahead of midnight for Florida fans. Eastern Time voters who treat 11:59 as "around midnight" may miscalculate by two hours and miss the final window. Sunday evening Florida time — not Sunday night — is when the late push needs to happen.

The ballot is embedded in a dated article on si.com/high-school/florida, not on a permanent standalone page. Because older articles stay online after their polls close, it is possible to land on a closed ballot if you search broadly rather than finding the current week's article by date. Check the publish date and confirm the widget is still live before organizing anyone around a link.

For context on how this poll compares to others in Florida, the Florida contest guides hub covers the Central Florida, Tampa Bay, and Northeast Florida regional polls that run on the same schedule. The national USA contest directory indexes the full SI regional POTW network across states.