Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Monday morning close — what most voters miss

The single thing a newcomer to this poll gets wrong is the deadline. Most weekly high school fan polls — the Rockford Register Star, the Peoria Journal Star, the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana — close Friday or Thursday. The Herald & Review closes Monday at 10 a.m. CT. Not Monday night. Ten in the morning.

That changes everything about how a campaign should be timed. If your instinct is to post the link Sunday night for a last push, you are already late by several hours in the psychology of it — voters who see a link at 10 p.m. Sunday and think "I'll vote in the morning" will miss the window. The effective campaign runs Saturday through Sunday, treating Sunday evening as the final mobilization sprint, not Monday.

The old Herald & Review format closed Thursday at noon. Some archived articles still cite that schedule. If you find a deadline listed as "Thursday" in an older piece, it does not apply to current polls — the current close is Monday at 10 a.m. CT, with results posted Monday afternoon.

Elijah Wills and what a defensive win tells you about this ballot

The one confirmed win on record for the Herald & Review football poll is Elijah Wills of St. Teresa High School — Week 5, 2021 season. The stat line: 9 tackles, 2 sacks, 2.5 tackles for loss. A defensive player. That is worth pausing on.

Fan-vote football polls almost always go to quarterbacks and running backs. An offensive showcase is easy to share — big yardage numbers land in text messages naturally. Nine tackles and two sacks require people who actually watched the game to understand the significance. For Wills to win on a defensive line, St. Teresa's community had to be organized, not just enthusiastic. They got their people to the ballot.

St. Teresa is a Catholic school in Decatur with a compact alumni network. It does not have the enrollment of MacArthur or Normal Community. But a tight community that moves together will out-vote a larger one that doesn't. The Wills result is not an upset in the sense of an underdog performance — it is a textbook illustration of how fan-vote outcomes are determined.

And that is the only confirmed win in the public record. The Herald & Review runs behind a Tollbit paywall, and most poll articles are not indexed with vote totals. If you want more historical context, Will Foley at [email protected] is the right contact. The public record stops at the Wills win.

The central Illinois landscape this poll covers

The Herald & Review is not a statewide outlet. It covers Decatur and the belt of central Illinois stretching roughly to Bloomington-Normal in the north and Mattoon-Charleston in the east. That geography matters for understanding the poll's field.

The schools are a mix of urban Decatur (MacArthur and Eisenhower are the two public high schools; St. Teresa the Catholic option), small-town programs within about twenty miles (Maroa-Forsyth, Mt. Zion, Shelbyville, Tri-City, Argenta-Oreana), and some Normal and Charleston representation at the margins of coverage. None of those schools compete at the enrollment scale of a Loyola Academy or Mount Carmel — those Chicago-area programs dominate the IHSA 8A and 7A postseason but are outside the Herald & Review's region entirely.

What this means for the poll: the community scale is manageable. A student at Argenta-Oreana — a school of a few hundred — attending a game in Decatur probably knows half the crowd. When that community decides to vote as a bloc, the numbers are achievable in a way they are not for a Chicago suburban mega-program trying to mobilize 10,000 alums. The Herald & Review poll is built for communities that can actually turn out together, which is most of the schools it covers.

For other Illinois fan-vote polls and the state's sports award landscape, see Illinois high school sports contests. The national directory is at /usa/.

Running a campaign before 10 a.m. Monday

Two things determine whether a Herald & Review nomination pays off: getting your player on the ballot, and reaching enough people before Monday morning's close.

Nominations go to Will Foley by email — [email protected]. A message that arrives Friday or Saturday, with the player's name, school, sport, position, the full stat line, and the opponent, gives him what he needs before the ballot is set for the week. A standout performance that no one flags can be missed entirely.

Once the poll is live, the window to move votes is narrower than it looks. Saturday is when community awareness peaks — postgame conversations, social posts, group chats. That is the time to share the link. Sunday is the main voting day. Sunday night should be a second push, not the first. Monday morning voting is possible but risky: most people are at school or work when the 10 a.m. deadline arrives.

Because the window is compressed and the geography tight, this poll rewards genuine community reach over volume from a single source. Getting fifty people from the booster group to vote once each before Sunday night matters more than one device accumulating votes over Monday. The how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence these fan polls share; for families and supporters who want to extend their reach, structured vote-support campaigns exist for weekly polls with hard deadlines like this one.