The Courier & Press Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Courier & Press Football Player of the Week is and who runs it

Unlike the season-long Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year, the Courier & Press weekly honor rolls out a fresh ballot every single week of the Indiana prep football season, and readers decide who takes each round. The organizer is Courier & Press, the program's vertical is sport, and supporters vote in a straightforward public poll carrying no entry fee and no registration barrier on the ballot.

The poll runs on the Crowdsignal platform, whose ballots live at poll.fm, and the series' voting URL is https://poll.fm/16229514. That URL serves the current week's question, and once a week's voting ends the same page shows the closed poll's results. The organizer's own sports coverage introduces the series with a simple instruction: "Each week you can vote for both the Courier & Press football Player of the Week."

The ballot draws its nominees from schools across the Courier & Press coverage area in southwestern Indiana. Towns whose programs appear on the option lists include Jasper, Princeton, Tecumseh, Mount Vernon, Boonville and Tell City, and recent ballots have carried nominees from Gibson Southern, North Daviess and Heritage Hills as well. That makes this poll a local reader-engagement award rather than a statewide ranking.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: seasons, the weekly window and what is not published

Confirmed seasons of the Courier & Press Football Player of the Week ran in 2023, 2024 and 2025, which is what qualifies the series as annual in this directory. The weekly ballots within those seasons fall between August and November, matching the length of the Indiana prep football schedule. The most recent run was the 2025 season, and 2026 is the year the next round is due.

Within the season the cadence is strict: one poll per week, each introduced by a new story on the paper's site and a new poll.fm ballot. The 2026 season's coverage already describes the first weeks of the series with a Week 1 and a Week 2 poll, so the weekly structure is carried forward rather than reinvented each fall.

The organizer does publish one hard deadline, and it sits in the paper's own coverage: voting closes at 5 p.m. CDT Thursday each week. What it does not publish is the wider calendar. No open date or close date for any individual week's ballot is printed ahead of time on the poll.fm page, and no nomination schedule is posted alongside it; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because each week is a fresh ballot, "the current edition" of this program means the active week's poll rather than a season-long entry period. A supporter checking in mid-season will find a different nominee list than a supporter who voted in the opening week, even though the question and the platform stay the same from August through November.

How a supporter votes on the Courier & Press ballot today

Voting in the Courier & Press Football Player of the Week is deliberately light. The supporter opens the current poll.fm ballot, reads the week's nominee list of player names paired with their high schools, ticks the button next to a name, and presses the voting control. Any reader may take part, and nothing on the ballot asks for payment, membership or registration before the vote counts.

The organizer's published rule is unusually generous. Courier & Press tells readers they can return repeatedly until 5 p.m. CDT Thursday, which does two jobs at once. It sets the deadline for every weekly round, and it removes any per-person limit within the week, so a supporter can come back between the ballot opening and the Thursday cutoff.

Closed polls behave differently from live ones. A finished Courier & Press weekly ballot displays its final standings publicly, pairing each nominee's percentage with a raw vote total. On one recent closed ballot the leading nominee finished at 53% with 53,864 votes, well clear of the runner-up at 41%, which shows that the weekly races can reach five-figure turnout when a community pushes hard.

Because the repeat rule is printed by the organizer, supporters do not need to guess at workarounds. The practical play for any nominee's camp is volume inside the week: rally people early, remind them the poll resets, and concentrate returns before Thursday afternoon. Everything a supporter needs to act, the nominee list, the voting control and the deadline, sits on the single poll.fm page for the active week.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

The Courier & Press weekly poll is one of six sibling programs on this site serving Indiana sports fans. Its nearest relative is the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year, which comes from the same publisher but honors a whole season rather than a single week. A reader who wins Player of the Week in September is eligible conversation for the Player of the Year ballot, but the two run on separate schedules and separate decisions.

The other siblings widen the frame. The Indiana High School Football Player of the Week competes for the same weekly football audience at a broader scale. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week spans multiple sports from a different paper, and the Indiana SI slate covers season-end honors: the Boys Basketball award, plus Football Player of the Year prizes in the 3A and 4A classes.

What makes the Courier & Press ballot distinctive in this group is the combination of a newspaper's local coverage area, a weekly reset, and a repeat-voting rule that most season-long awards do not match. A supporter in Jasper, Princeton or Tell City has a fresh chance every week the team plays, and the paper's coverage ties each poll to that week's games, which keeps turnout local and competitive rather than statewide.

For a nominee's supporters, the weekly shape changes strategy too: momentum does not carry over, so each week is its own campaign with its own Thursday finish line. That is a different rhythm from the Player of the Year siblings, where a slow build across months is the winning pattern.

Strengthening support in a weekly poll that resets every Thursday

A weekly ballot rewards fast mobilization. Because the Courier & Press poll closes at 5 p.m. CDT Thursday and the organizer welcomes repeat voting, the winning campaigns are the ones that collect repeated returns from a core group rather than one wide announcement. Tie the ask to the week's game result, share the poll.fm link while the result is fresh, and remind people the count restarts next week.

The organizer's rules are the boundary for any outside help. Courier & Press publishes a wide-open repeat allowance for this poll, which means volume from real supporters is invited by the ballot's own terms. Tactics grounded in this format, from team group chats to Friday-night announcements, are covered in our votes guide, and the legal position around purchased support is laid out in our legality page.