Treasure Valley High School Soccer Players of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing this poll does that no other Idaho soccer poll does

Most player-of-the-week fan votes cover one sport and one gender. The Idaho Statesman's Treasure Valley Soccer Players of the Week poll covers both — one article, two separate embedded ballots, boys and girls nominees side by side. That structure is easy to miss if you come from the football or volleyball Varsity Extra polls, which are single-gender. It matters because voting in the girls ballot does nothing for a boys nominee, and vice versa. A family that shows up for one player and casts all their votes in the wrong bracket has done their nominee no good at all.

The second thing worth knowing upfront: this poll closes Thursday at noon. Not Sunday. Not Friday night. Noon on Thursday, which is a full two and a half days before the SI / SBLive statewide Idaho Athlete of the Week poll closes. If you have been following the SI poll and assume the soccer vote runs on the same calendar, you will almost certainly vote into a closed ballot.

Those two structural facts — dual-gender format and Thursday noon close — explain most of what goes wrong for Treasure Valley soccer campaigns that should have won but didn't.

What the Sept 22-28 ballot actually looked like

The Sept 22-28 week is the only fully documented ballot on record for this poll, and it gives a clean picture of the field's range. Eight girls nominees, eight boys. Goalkeepers on both sides: Emily Wendt of Rocky Mountain (10 saves, 2 shutouts) for girls; Alvaro Espinoza of Vallivue (10 saves, 2 shutouts) for boys. Scorers ranged from Karli Roubidoux of Fruitland putting up 7 goals across 3 games to Grace Hatch of Boise with 6 and Jenna Seals of Vallivue with 4 goals and 3 assists. On the boys side, Nathan Compas of Parma went 3 goals and 4 assists while Jose Manuel of McCall-Donnelly posted 2 goals and 4 assists — playmakers rather than pure strikers nominated alongside finishers.

Read the school list and you see what the ballot is designed to do. Fruitland (3A) and McCall-Donnelly on the same list as Timberline, Rocky Mountain, and Mountain View (all 5A). Parma next to Boise. Owyhee next to Mountain View. The editorial desk is not picking only the largest schools — it is picking the best performances, and that means any classification can land on the ballot in a given week.

No public winner is confirmed for that week or any prior week; the Idaho Statesman does not publish a consistent weekly recap with final totals the way some outlets do. What the live ballot shows while the poll is open is the only real-time data available. The field above is the confirmed slate — who won it is not on record.

The Thursday noon wall and how campaigns misread it

Noon Thursday is earlier than it sounds. Games happen Tuesday and Wednesday for much of the soccer season. A coach reports stats to the Statesman Wednesday morning; the article with the ballot sometimes goes up Wednesday afternoon. At that point, depending on when the new poll is published, a campaign might have less than 24 hours before the cutoff.

Compare that to the SI statewide poll, which opens after Friday games and closes Sunday night — effectively a 48-hour window with the whole weekend to mobilize. The Treasure Valley soccer ballot, at its tightest, runs from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday noon. That is the real cadence, and it means Tuesday and Wednesday are the preparation days, not the voting days.

The communities that do well here are the ones who already have a channel live and ready when the ballot drops. An Owyhee booster group that posts a link within an hour of the article going up and sends a reminder Wednesday night is running a fundamentally different campaign from one that finds out about the ballot Thursday morning and scrambles. The Thursday noon wall does not forgive late starters.

For broader context on how weekly prep sports fan votes run across Idaho, the Idaho high school sports guide covers the full landscape, and the national directory is at /usa/. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence of fan-vote campaigns across poll types.

How the valley's school geography shapes campaign dynamics

Treasure Valley stretches across Ada, Canyon, Gem, Owyhee, and Boise counties. The 5A Boise metro programs — Timberline, Rocky Mountain, Mountain View, Eagle, Centennial, Boise, Capital — draw from large student bodies and wide alumni networks. But large and fast are not the same thing. A program with 2,000 students across Boise's school district has more potential voters than Fruitland or Parma. It does not automatically have more organized voters.

The Canyon County schools — Nampa, Caldwell, Vallivue, Kuna, Middleton — sit between the two extremes. Tighter communities than the Boise metro 5A programs, bigger rosters of potential supporters than the rural western Idaho 3A programs. And then the smaller-classification schools at the far edge of the coverage area: Parma, Fruitland, Weiser, McCall-Donnelly. A McCall-Donnelly soccer parent driving an hour to an away game and back is part of a community that is already, by necessity, tightly networked. Jose Manuel's 2 goals and 4 assists in a week where McCall-Donnelly made the ballot alongside Boise 5A programs is not a fluke — it is what happens when a smaller school's community shows up in full.

Structured support through vote campaigns exists for fan polls like this one, for teams whose natural reach does not match the competition in a short Thursday-noon window.