Illinois SI Football Class 6A Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

East St. Louis, Fenwick, and the two Illinois worlds that share Class 6A

Two schools met for the Class 6A state title in back-to-back years, and they could not come from more different places. East St. Louis, an industrial river city across the Mississippi from downtown St. Louis with one of the deepest playoff traditions in the state, beat Geneva 48-28 for the 2024 crown. A year later, Fenwick, a Catholic school in Oak Park pulling from Chicago's West Side suburbs, flipped the result and beat East St. Louis 38-28 for the 2025 title.

That single exchange tells you what Class 6A actually is: not a geographic cluster, not a shared media market, but an enrollment band that happens to catch a Metro East public powerhouse and a Chicago-area parochial program in the same bracket. Six hundred miles of Illinois sits between those two fan bases on a normal week. On a fan-vote ballot, they're one click apart. For how fan-vote polls handle that kind of mismatch in general (caps, disqualification, what counts as a valid click), the online contest voting guide lays out the baseline before the Class 6A specifics below.

What the 6A ballot actually confirms, and what SI doesn't publish

SI does not maintain a searchable archive of who's been nominated for the Class 6A Player of the Year in any given cycle. What's confirmed sits one level up: the classification itself, its recent state-title results, and the platform that runs the vote. East St. Louis and Fenwick trading the 2024 and 2025 titles is public record. Who's actually on this year's ballot stays under wraps until SI's Illinois desk posts the live article, no earlier.

That gap is normal for a per-class annual award, not a defect. IHSA reassigns classification at the end of each regular season based on prior- year enrollment, so a school that sat in 6A last fall can move to 5A or 7A the next. A program's presence on this year's 6A ballot says something about this year's enrollment count, nothing more permanent. Naming a current favorite before the postseason wraps would be a guess dressed up as a fact, so this page doesn't.

How voting on si.com/high-school/illinois actually runs

The mechanics are the one part of this that holds steady year to year. SI embeds the Class 6A widget inside an article on si.com/high-school/illinois once IHSA's 6A postseason concludes — usually late November into December, though the exact date shifts with the playoff calendar. No account, no email address, and no download stand between a reader and a counted vote.

Scripts, macros, and anything firing faster than a person tapping a screen are barred across every property SI runs, not just this one ballot. A flagged pattern gets that program's tally pulled back down before the window closes. Checking the current year's article against the current rules on buying votes is worth doing before assuming last cycle's terms still hold.

Why a river city and a parochial suburb keep landing in the same bracket

Six-A sits in the middle of IHSA's eight-class ladder — big enough to exclude the smallest downstate programs, small enough that it never pulls in the state's largest collar-county suburbs the way Class 8A does. What fills that middle band is a genuine mix. East St. Louis anchors a Southwestern Conference contingent whose closest media market is St. Louis, not Chicago — a separate newspaper, a separate radio dial, a separate rivalry calendar entirely.

Fenwick, Providence Catholic, Nazareth Academy, and Joliet Catholic Academy represent the opposite pole: Chicago Catholic League programs drawing from parish networks and alumni chains that stretch across several counties rather than one town. Add Kankakee to the south, Sycamore and Rock Island further west, and Normal West and Peoria Richwoods downstate, and Class 6A ends up spanning nearly the full length of the state without ever concentrating in one metro cluster. The Illinois contest hub lists the state's other formats for anyone comparing more than this one ballot at once.

Running a 6A campaign when your rival isn't in your media market

A Class 6A program's realistic competition usually isn't down the street. It's a school with its own separate fan base, its own separate local paper, sometimes its own separate time zone of attention entirely. That changes the math. A Metro East program pushing East St. Louis-style turnout doesn't need to out-shout a Chicago suburb for the same local headline — it needs its own network to show up, full stop.

For a parish-network program like Fenwick or Nazareth, that means routing the direct article link (not a search for the school's name) through the parish bulletin, the alumni network's mailing list, and the roster's own group thread the same day the ballot goes live — Catholic League alumni chains often stretch well beyond the school's home county, and most of that reach never converts without a direct link in hand. For a Southwestern Conference program, it's the booster network and the local radio mention that do the heavy lifting; East St. Louis's playoff tradition means a large, dispersed alumni base exists, but dispersed support only shows up if someone sends the exact link.

Programs that have already worked their own network dry and still see a gap heading into the final days sometimes look at a sports fan-poll vote service built around paced, real clicks. It won't manufacture a fan base that doesn't exist. What it can do is convert genuine, existing support that simply hasn't found the link yet — a real risk on a ballot that can open and close inside a holiday stretch.