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

The one thing most Treasure Valley voters learn too late

The Treasure Valley Football Player of the Week closes Thursday at noon. Not Sunday. Not Monday night. Thursday at noon — roughly 72 hours after Friday's games, sometimes less. That gap is the entire strategic landscape of this poll, and most families and booster groups find out about it the wrong way: they share the link on Thursday morning and discover the window has already closed.

Compare that to how Idaho's other main football fan vote runs. The SI/SBLive statewide Idaho Athlete of the Week stays open through Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — nearly five full days after the games. The Statesman's regional football poll gives you half that. The practical consequence is that the decisive push has to happen Sunday through Wednesday. A campaign that treats this like a full-week vote will be looking at final totals it can't change.

There is a second thing worth noting for first-time voters: the poll does not cap votes per person. The Statesman states it plainly in every article — "You can vote multiple times. This is meant to be a fun way to show support for athletes." Returning to the article and voting again is built into the experience. But multiple votes from a handful of people is not the same as spreading the link to a few hundred people each voting once or twice. The Thursday close makes the second path — real reach, real people — far more important than grinding from one device.

What the 2025 season ballots show about the field

Two ballots from 2025 are fully documented and worth reading as a pair.

Week 1, on September 2, drew twelve nominees — one of the largest single ballots in the confirmed record. Ben Avella of Bishop Kelly threw for 266 yards and 6 touchdowns in the first half alone. Gunner Newman of McCall-Donnelly put up 432 total yards and 4 TDs. Jake Perez of Middleton had 182 rush yards and 3 scores. Across those twelve names you had 5A Boise metro programs (Timberline, Capital, Rocky Mountain, Mountain View, Eagle, Skyview), a 4A private school (Bishop Kelly), a 4A Canyon County program (Middleton), a 3A western Idaho school (Fruitland), and two rural 2A programs (McCall-Donnelly, Horseshoe Bend, Garden Valley). That breadth in a single ballot is the Statesman's entire coverage footprint at once.

Playoffs Round 1, on November 4, showed something else: eleven nominees, every one of them still alive in the postseason. Jake Perez had his best game of the year — 237 rush yards and 5 TDs. Riley Davis of Salmon River put up 232 total yards and 6 scores. A 5A Rocky Mountain nominee (Oakley Baxter, 108 rush yards, 2 TDs) and a 2A Salmon River nominee landed on the same list, with the same shot. The ballot does not sort by classification. It sorts by performance.

No raw vote totals or winning percentages from either ballot are publicly archived — the Statesman does not publish final counts the way SI does with percentages in its recaps. What the ballot record does tell you is that the field here is genuinely wide. A school from the mountains three hours from Boise makes the same ballot as a school from the metro, every week of the season.

Ada County and Canyon County: two kinds of turnout

The practical geography splits into two zones that behave differently in fan-vote races.

The Ada County metro — Rocky Mountain, Mountain View, Eagle, Centennial, Capital, Timberline in the Boise-to-Eagle corridor — has the largest absolute fan bases. These are schools with thousands of current students, deep alumni networks, and strong social media followings. The challenge is coordination. A poll link that goes out to a large, diffuse group takes longer to convert into actual votes. A Rocky Mountain booster page with 4,000 followers is only useful if those 4,000 people see the post and act on it by Wednesday.

Canyon County programs — Middleton, Nampa, Caldwell, Vallivue, Kuna — are smaller in enrollment but operate in communities where the football program is more central to local identity. Middleton had a nominee in both the Week 1 and Playoffs Round 1 ballots in 2025. In a valley poll that closes Thursday at noon, a tighter community that can route a message through a few close networks on Sunday and Monday may outperform a larger school whose organization kicks in on Wednesday.

The rural programs — McCall-Donnelly, Fruitland, Garden Valley, Horseshoe Bend, Salmon River — have the smallest absolute numbers but the most centralized social topology. A school of 200 students in a mountain town has one booster group, one parent text chain, one community Facebook page. That chain is short and fast. Gunner Newman's 432-yard game put McCall-Donnelly on a twelve-player Week 1 ballot alongside schools that enrollment-wise dwarf it. Whether that turns into votes by Thursday noon depends entirely on how quickly the McCall-Donnelly community finds the link and shares it.

Running a real campaign before Thursday noon

Getting a player onto the ballot is step one. The Idaho Statesman builds the field from stats submitted by area coaches and reporters — so the submission has to happen. After Friday's game, a coach or program staffer should get the full stat line (player, school, position, yards, scores, the opponent and score) to the Statesman's Varsity Extra platform before the weekend is over. The ballot usually goes live Sunday or early in the week. A performance nobody flags can be missed even if the numbers were good.

Once the article is published, the campaign window is Sunday through Wednesday. Post it in the team's parent group chats Sunday. Get the players themselves to share it — their own friend networks are the fastest distribution channel. The booster page should post it at least twice: once when it goes live, once Tuesday or Wednesday when the race often tightens. Because the ballot is uncapped, supporters who return to vote more than once matter; because the close is Thursday at noon, every day of inaction is permanent.

For schools with supporters spread beyond the valley — alumni in Boise who moved away, former players living in Twin Falls or Salt Lake — the ask is simple: find the article on the Idaho Statesman or Yahoo Sports and vote a few times. The poll is embedded in the article; there is no separate site to find. The weekly fan-vote how-to guide covers the general cadence for polls like this. More Idaho fan votes are indexed at /usa/idaho/ and the full national directory is at /usa/.