Iowa Class 3A Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who won the 2024 Iowa Class 3A Football Player of the Year — and by how much?

The headline result for the 2024 Iowa Class 3A Football Player of the Year poll belongs to Coen Matson of Humboldt High School. Matson, a senior quarterback, won the Class 3A fan vote after a season that produced 2,616 passing yards, a 64 percent completion rate, 28 touchdown passes, 332 rushing yards, and five rushing scores. He was also named Class 3A Player of the Year by the Iowa Football Coaches Association (IFCA) — making him a double recipient of the top 3A individual honour.

The Class 3A win was a stepping stone: Matson went on to win the combined overall Iowa Football Player of the Year vote on the same platform, capturing 64.71 percent of the total vote across all seven IHSAA classifications — the clearest dominant margin of the recent cross-class cycles. His win against nominees from larger 5A and 4A schools underscores a consistent pattern in small-class Iowa fan polls: well-organised rural communities generate per-capita vote engagement that outpaces larger urban enrolments.

Iowa Class 3A football's dynasty programmes and 2024 season

Class 3A is historically the most competitive classification for dynasty-building in Iowa football. Harlan holds 14 state championships — the most of any programme in any Iowa class — anchoring the southwest-Iowa Hawkeye 10 Conference as the state's pre-eminent football community. Harlan's most recent back-to-back titles (their latest consecutive pair) established a standard of sustained dominance that few programmes in any classification can match.

Wahlert Catholic's 2024 championship — a 49-14 win over Humboldt at UNI-Dome — was the programme's first ever football title and came as a genuine surprise to many observers who expected Humboldt's Matson-led offence to carry them. The margin of the final does not diminish what Matson accomplished individually: his regular-season and playoff-round production earned both the editorial IFCA award and the fan-vote POY before the championship game's outcome.

Geography of Class 3A power

Unlike Class 5A's Des Moines-metro concentration, Class 3A programmes are distributed across all corners of Iowa: Harlan in the southwest, Humboldt in the north, Wahlert Catholic in the east, Iowa City Regina in the east-central corridor, and Sergeant Bluff-Luton in the northwest. This geographic spread means Class 3A fan-poll campaigns draw on genuinely different community types — from Harlan's farm-country dynasty culture to Dubuque's Catholic school alumni network to Humboldt's tight north-central Iowa town identity.

How the Iowa Class 3A Football Player of the Year poll works

The Class 3A Football Player of the Year poll operates identically to the other High School on SI Iowa class polls. The 2024 postseason article is at si.com/high-school/iowa/vote-who-is-the-iowa-class-3a-football-player-of-the-year-01jd08pswv1y; a 2025 preseason poll has also run, confirming the programme is in at least its second cycle. Each new season generates a fresh article at si.com/high-school/iowa.

The embedded poll widget lists each finalist with a name, school, position, and stat note. Any visitor clicks a finalist's name and submits — no login, no email, no captcha. Live vote totals update in the widget, letting communities track the real-time competitive gap. There is no published per-hour vote restriction for this annual award format.

Why small-town Iowa Class 3A communities can dominate fan-poll voting

The evidence is concrete: Coen Matson of Class 3A Humboldt won 64.71 percent of a seven-class statewide vote that included Class 5A nominees from 1,500-student metro schools. This is not a fluke — the same pattern emerged in 2023, when Preston Ries of Class 2A Monticello won the overall Iowa Football Player of the Year with an even smaller-class base. Two consecutive years, two small-class winners, both by substantial margins.

The structural reason is community cohesion. In a town like Humboldt (population ~4,400) or Monticello (~3,700), the standout high school athlete is known personally by an unusually high percentage of the population. Extended families, local businesses, farming networks, church congregations, and community Facebook groups all converge on the same person. When a poll goes live, word spreads through those tight networks within hours. The result is a per-capita voting rate that can exceed that of a 5A metro school with three times the enrollment but a fraction of the community cohesion.

Class 3A vote-mobilisation channels

When organic community engagement has reached its ceiling — or when a competitor from a similarly tight-knit community is running a parallel campaign — supplementary vote services offer an additional lever. For polls with no published per-hour cap and no cash prize, services delivering genuine human votes paced over days produce leads that are both durable and less detectable than burst patterns. The sports fan poll votes service and contest voting guide cover the mechanics. For the full Iowa contest landscape, including the overall statewide Iowa Football Player of the Year and other sport-specific awards, visit the Iowa hub and the USA contest index.