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

Jaylen Johnson won twice in four weeks — here is what that reveals

Thomas County Central is a 4A program in Thomasville, a city of about 19,000 people in the southwest Georgia wiregrass. In four weeks of confirmed 2024 South Georgia POTW data, Thomas County Central put nominees on the ballot twice and won twice: Christian Lawrence earned a nomination the week of 9/2 (199 yards, 2 touchdowns), and Jaylen Johnson won the 10/8 poll outright with 405 yards and 5 touchdowns — beating Houston County (6A) and Benedictine on the same ballot.

That pattern tells you more about how this poll works than any mechanic does. Thomas County Central does not have the enrollment of a Lowndes or Colquitt County. What it has is a community where football is a weekly civic event and the booster network already knows the poll exists. Two nominations in four weeks is not luck — it reflects a school whose people show up, in the stadium and in the voting window.

The opposing data point is equally instructive. Antwann Hill of Houston County posted 302 yards and 5 touchdowns in the 10/1 poll (losing to Dominique Ball) and came back with 489 yards and 8 touchdowns in the 10/8 poll — one of the highest stat lines across the full 2024 sample — and still did not win. A stat line does not decide a fan vote. Turnout does.

The field you are actually competing against: 10 to 18 nominees

The South Georgia ballot is structurally different from most other SI regional football polls. Where the Texas regional ballots typically run six nominees, the South Georgia editors nominate 10 to 18 players per week. That wider field changes the math in one specific way: vote share is diluted across more names, which means the winner's percentage is often lower than on a six-nominee ballot, and a candidate who consolidates even a single county's support can move from the middle of the pack to the top.

One structural fact worth naming: the South Georgia poll runs only through the GHSA regular season. When the playoffs begin in mid-November, High School on SI replaces both regional ballots with a single statewide Georgia Playoff POTW. A player nominated in October faces a South Georgia field; the same player nominated in November faces every Georgia region at once. The ballot and the strategy change at that boundary.

Rural networks and the Valdosta-Lowndes fault line

South Georgia football is organized around county loyalty in a way that Atlanta-metro football is not. In Gwinnett County you have Grayson, Collins Hill, Archer, and several other large programs competing for the same fan attention. In Colquitt County there is essentially one program: the Colquitt County Packers. In Irwin County there is Irwin County High. That single-school county structure matters when a nominee appears on the ballot — the entire county's football community is pointing at one name, not dividing across three or four.

The confirmed 2024 data shows programs from across that geography winning or coming close: Westover (Columbus area, 4A), Thomas County Central (Thomasville, 4A), Irwin County (Ocilla, 2A), and Lowndes (6A, Lowndes County) all produced nominees or winners in the same season. No single GHSA class or metro cluster dominated.

The Valdosta-Lowndes fault line runs through the most watched county in South Georgia football. Valdosta High School and Lowndes High School are the same county's two flagship programs — they have played one of Georgia prep football's longest-standing rivalries at a local level. When Lowndes's Aalim Brown was confirmed as a prior winner at the start of the 9/2 poll and Valdosta's Corey Howard earned a defensive nomination the week of 10/16, the underlying rivalry was present in the voting pool. Those communities do not need extra motivation to compete — the dynamic already exists on Friday nights, and it carries into Sunday's deadline.

Running a real campaign before Sunday night

The South Georgia poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT. That is the single structural constraint that every campaign decision points toward.

The poll typically opens Monday or Tuesday, after SI's editors review the previous weekend's box scores. The first 48 hours after the poll goes live are historically the highest-velocity window — supporters who see the link immediately convert at higher rates than those who see it Thursday. Getting the link into school and booster networks before Tuesday afternoon matters.

Mid-week is maintenance: a reminder post through the school's social channels on Thursday or Friday, ideally with the current standings visible if the widget shows live totals. Saturday and Sunday are the closing push — the window when a trailing nominee's community can close a gap or a leading nominee's community can hold it.

Because rural South Georgia communities are often geographically concentrated, the distribution task is shorter than it looks. In a county with one major program, the booster network, the church community, and the school's alumni all overlap in the same group chats and Facebook pages. A single well-timed post on a school's official social account can reach most of the people who would vote at all. That concentration is a structural advantage — one that the confirmed data (Thomas County Central winning twice in four weeks from a 4A base in Thomasville) reflects directly. For campaigns that need additional vote volume before Sunday's close, vote-support packages are built for this recurring weekly format.