Hudson Valley New York High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Section 1 is a county, not a ranking — and that shapes every ballot

The NYSPHSAA uses enrollment-based classes — AA down through D — to separate programs for playoff purposes. On the lohud ballot, none of that separation applies. The Oct 27, 2025 field put Tyler Prisco of North Rockland (a Class AA program) alongside A.J. Alomar of Briarcliff/Hamilton and Declan Connolly of Tuckahoe — schools a fraction of North Rockland's enrollment — on the same eleven-name list. Class AA status does not weight a vote, and Class B schools do not start at a structural disadvantage. The fan vote is genuinely flat.

What that means in practice: Matt Bentivenga of Mahopac won a 2025 week with three sacks in a shutout, a defensive-line performance that might be overlooked in favor of a flashier offensive game — but Mahopac's Putnam County community organized and the votes followed. Logan Wissner of Hackley, a non-public school outside the NYSPHSAA public bracket entirely, also won a 2025 week. The ballot's openness to public, private, large, and small is not incidental — it is the design.

That openness means no school arrives on the ballot with an inherent advantage. The question is always which community organizes fastest in a 48-hour window.

The confirmed 2025 field: what the stat lines actually show

The Oct 27, 2025 ballot is the most complete single-week snapshot on record for this poll. Eleven nominees, eleven performances worth reading in full:

A few things stand out. Fitzgerald of Pearl River is the only nominee that week who earned the nod for production on both sides of the ball in the same game — six catches and eleven tackles. Miller of Albertus Magnus played five positions. These are not outliers; they reflect what lohud's editors reward when they build the field: full-game contributions over single-dimension stats. A player who goes both ways, or who changes a game in multiple phases, shows up on this ballot regularly.

The November follow-up ballot shrank to six names: Carson Miller of Rye (14/21, 347 passing yards, two touchdowns, plus 87 rushing yards and three more scores in a single game), Crew Davis of Iona Prep, Thomas Freeman of Bronxville, Henry Kelly of Mamaroneck, Brayden Richardson of Sleepy Hollow, and Declan Connolly of Tuckahoe. A six-name field is a different competitive dynamic than eleven — fewer ways for votes to split, and the winner typically needs a cleaner community majority to separate.

The 48-hour clock: how Westchester-Rockland campaigns actually run

The lohud poll opens Monday and closes Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. ET. That is the most compressed window of any recurring high school football fan vote in New York. The statewide SI poll that sometimes features Yorktown, North Rockland, or Rye closes Sunday night — meaning a Section 1 school that appears on the SI ballot has until Sunday to build momentum. On the lohud poll, the same campaign has until Wednesday afternoon.

That compression changes the tactical math. A slow-building effort — the kind that counts on organic shares accumulating over five or six days — does not have time to work here. The campaigns that win on lohud are the ones that move immediately Monday when the article posts, sustain through Tuesday evening with a second push, and make a final Wednesday morning ask before the 3:00 p.m. close. Three deliberate moments, not a week of passive sharing.

The community topology of Westchester and Rockland is well-suited to this cadence when it is activated correctly. Eastchester, Pelham, Bronxville, and Tuckahoe draw from tight suburban communities where a team parent group or booster page reaches most of the relevant fan base in one message. Mamaroneck and New Rochelle carry larger networks that take longer to move but cover more ground when they do. North Rockland and Mahopac — one a Rockland County public program, the other a Putnam County community anchor — have alumni networks that stretch well beyond the county line. Pearl River's Irish-American community and Sleepy Hollow's Latino community each have their own internal channels that lohud's readership geography does not fully capture but that the poll's open format accommodates.

For any of these communities, the 48-hour constraint makes Tuesday the decisive day. Monday is for getting the link out; Wednesday morning is a last-minute close; Tuesday evening — when most supporters are home and checking phones — is where a race turns. A campaign that sends one message Monday and waits will routinely be passed by one that sends a deliberate Tuesday reminder. That is not a theory; it is the structure of a 48-hour ballot.

Because the poll is open and settled purely by how many readers a campaign reaches before Wednesday's close, structured support through services like vote-support campaigns exists for exactly this kind of compressed weekly poll. For general context on how regional fan votes work, see the how-to guide; more New York and Hudson Valley contests are listed at /usa/hudson-valley-new-york/ and the full national directory at /usa/.