Illinois SI Football Class 5A Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Where Class 5A actually sits on Illinois's eight-rung football ladder

Four classes of smaller programs sit below Class 5A. Three larger ones sit above it. That single fact orients a searcher who landed on this specific ballot instead of the neighboring 4A or 6A page better than any nominee list could — a 5A school isn't up against the state's smallest programs, and it isn't competing with the collar-county giants that dominate 7A and 8A either.

High School on SI runs the vote at si.com/high-school/illinois, embedded inside that season's Class 5A article rather than a standalone form. The site follows the same per-class structure it uses for its Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan football coverage: eight separate ballots, eight separate winners, no combined statewide vote folding 5A into a larger pool. For the baseline rules that govern fan-vote polls generally, caps, disqualification, what counts as a valid click, the online contest voting guide covers that ground before the Illinois specifics below.

What's confirmed about the Class 5A ballot, and where the record goes quiet

SI doesn't maintain a searchable archive of past Class 5A nominees or winners. What's confirmed sits one level up: the eight-class structure itself, the platform running it, and the fact that IHSA reassigns classification by enrollment at the end of each regular season. A program sitting in 5A this fall could shift to 4A or 6A the next, depending on how its enrollment count lands against that year's cutoffs.

That's a normal feature of an enrollment-based ladder, not a gap to apologize for. Naming a favorite before a season's postseason results are in would be a guess wearing a fact's clothes, so this page won't do that. What can be said honestly: the 5A ballot draws, cycle after cycle, from programs the enrollment math places squarely in the middle of the state's football landscape, even as the specific roster of schools shifts underneath that constant.

How the Class 5A vote actually runs on si.com/high-school/illinois

The mechanics hold steadier than the nominee list does. SI embeds the Class 5A widget in an article once IHSA's 5A postseason wraps, typically late November into December, though the exact date moves with the playoff calendar each year. Nothing gates the click itself. No account. No email address. No app.

Scripts, and anything firing faster than a thumb tapping a screen, are barred across every property SI runs, not just this ballot. A flagged pattern gets a program's tally pulled back down before the window shuts. Checking the live article against the current rules on buying votes beats assuming last year's terms carried over unchanged.

The suburban-downstate mix that fills a Class 5A ballot

Central Illinois carries real weight in this tier. Springfield's Sacred Heart-Griffin and nearby Rochester draw from the Springfield metro's Central State Eight and Sangamo conferences — programs with deep community roots but not the collar-county enrollment numbers that push a school toward 7A or 8A. Mahomet-Seymour, east of Springfield in the Apollo Conference, sits in a comparable band.

Further north, Morris and Kaneland, both Interstate 8 Conference members roughly ninety minutes apart, land in the same enrollment window most cycles. Crete-Monee's Southland Athletic Conference roster and Coal City's Illinois Central Eight programs add a south-suburban and rural mix that never quite converges on one media market. Add the Mid-Illini contingent around Peoria, Washington, Metamora, and Peoria Notre Dame, plus the Three Rivers Conference pair of Geneseo and Sterling further west, and Class 5A ends up drawing from nearly every corner of the state without concentrating in a single metro cluster the way 8A's Chicago suburbs do. The Illinois contest hub lists the state's other formats for anyone comparing more than this one ballot.

Campaigning from the exact middle of the ladder

A 5A program's real advantage matches what 6A and 7A schools get: seven sibling nominees scattered across the state rather than clustered in one metro competing for the same eyeballs. A Peoria-area push and a south-suburban Crete-Monee push aren't fighting for the same local radio mention or the same regional Facebook groups. Distance that hurts in a single combined statewide vote works in a per-class program's favor here.

Speed still decides close ballots. Sending the exact article link, not a school name typed into a search bar, the same day the window opens beats scrambling during the final week — a window that, in past cycles, has run barely a month and crossed straight through Thanksgiving into early December. A booster text with the direct link converts more reliably than a general social post, because it removes the step where a supporter has to find one 5A headline among eight that look nearly identical.

A short window that crosses Thanksgiving is unforgiving for a program still trailing after the alumni list, the booster group, and every school chat have already been tapped out. That's the point where a sports fan-poll vote service built around paced, real clicks enters the picture for some 5A campaigns. It won't invent backers who don't exist. What it does is put the link in front of real, existing supporters who never happened to see it, which matters most when a holiday stretch eats into the final days.