Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Courier & Press football votes, not one

Most readers who know the Evansville Courier & Press only from its weekly Athlete of the Week widget assume that's the whole story. It isn't. The paper runs a second, entirely separate football ballot: Football Player of the Year, split into a preseason edition before Week 1 and an end-of-season edition after the regular season wraps. Same organizer, same courierpress.com home, different mechanic, different rhythm, different question being asked of readers.

The preseason vote asks who will have the standout year before a single down is played. The end-of-season vote asks who actually delivered. Those are not the same judgment, and the paper doesn't pretend they are, the 2025 preseason field alone pulled in more than 85,500 total votes, a number that dwarfs a typical single-week Athlete of the Week total and signals how much weight Southwest Indiana readers put on football specifically when the ballot is framed around a full season rather than one week's performance.

That split matters for anyone planning around this vote. A campaign built for the weekly poll, quick, reactive, tied to a single Friday's box score, doesn't map cleanly onto a preseason or end-of-season ballot that's judging reputation or a full year's tape. The mechanics of moving a large, open fan vote like this one are covered in the online vote-buying guide; the specifics below are what actually separates this Courier & Press ballot from its own weekly sibling.

What the 85,500-vote field tells you about this ballot

Eighty-five thousand, five hundred votes. That's the confirmed total for the 2025 preseason Football Player of the Year field, and it's a genuinely large number for a regional preseason poll, larger than most single Athlete of the Week weeks from the same paper, and large enough to suggest the ballot reaches well past the immediate families of the nominated players.

What the paper doesn't do is publish that total while the ballot is still live. Readers see the count after the poll closes, not a running leaderboard they can check mid-campaign the way some SecondStreet-style widgets allow. That's a real limitation, and it's worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: anyone trying to gauge momentum on this specific ballot is working without a scoreboard. The close date printed in the hosting article is the only fixed reference point.

A field that size doesn't build itself on family and classmates alone. It's the same Southwest Indiana network that produces 40,000-plus weekly totals on the paper's Athlete of the Week poll, Memorial and Mater Dei alumni chains, Warrick County's Castle boosters, rural county Facebook groups around Gibson and Dubois, just pointed at a single season-long ballot instead of split across fifty-two weekly ones.

How the preseason and end-of-season ballots actually run

Both editions live inside the Courier & Press High School Sports section at courierpress.com, but neither sits at a fixed, bookmarkable URL the way the weekly Athlete of the Week widget does. Each ballot is its own article, published once before Week 1 and once after the regular season, so finding the live poll means checking the sports section or searching the site around those two windows rather than returning to a saved link.

Nomination for either edition is editorial, not open submission. The sports desk builds the preseason field from prior-season performance, recruiting attention, and coach input gathered before the season begins; the end-of-season field comes from what actually happened across the fall. A coach or program with a strong candidate for either ballot gets in front of the sports desk directly, there's no public nomination form the way some Google Forms-based regional polls run.

Voting itself is free and open to anyone who reaches the article, no Courier & Press subscription, account, or personal information required, matching the access pattern of the paper's weekly poll. Where it departs from that weekly poll is the clock: instead of a predictable Monday-open, Friday-or-Saturday-close cadence, this ballot's window is tied to the football calendar itself. Always confirm the close date in the specific article hosting that year's ballot.

Building a campaign around a football-only, twice-a-year vote

This is not a poll a family wins by checking back every hour for a week. The rhythm is different: a preseason push happens before anyone has played a down, built entirely on reputation, program buzz, and a coach's willingness to talk up a returning starter to the sports desk months in advance. An end-of-season push works off an actual body of work, box scores, playoff runs, a signature performance against a rival, that a supporter can point to directly.

The same networks that move the weekly Athlete of the Week poll apply here, they just get pointed at one ballot instead of fifty-two. Memorial and Mater Dei's alumni reach spans generations of Evansville West Side families; a preseason nomination for either program can draw on parish bulletins and booster email chains the moment the article goes live. Heritage Hills, out in Spencer County, carries a different kind of pull, a smaller-enrollment program whose community rallies hard behind a single standout name rather than splitting attention across a deep roster the way a larger city school might.

Because there's no live count to check mid-campaign, the practical approach is front-loaded: get the word out the moment the ballot article publishes, keep pushing through the stated window, and treat the printed close date, not a guessed deadline, as the real cutoff. For the theory behind sustained turnout on an open, cap-light ballot like this one, our how-to guides cover the general playbook; when organic reach tops out before close, fan poll vote support is built for exactly this kind of large, open, real-voter turnout ballot.

For the rest of Indiana's fan-vote landscape, including the paper's own weekly Athlete of the Week poll, the statewide Indiana Preps football vote, and the full slate of Indiana contests, see the Indiana contest hub, part of the national USA contest directory.