Iowa Football Player of the Year — Class 2A: How Voting Works & How to Win

West Lyon won at the UNI-Dome. Who won the fan vote is still unclear.

Forty-two to seven. That was the final at the UNI-Dome when West Lyon closed out Spirit Lake for the 2024 Class 2A state title, the program's fifth football championship and a statement from Iowa's far northwest corner. Anyone who follows Siouxland Conference football already knows that score by heart.

What almost nobody can answer is who won the fan vote. High School on SI runs a separate, dedicated Class 2A Football Player of the Year article each season, distinct from the scoreboard result entirely — and unlike its Class 3A sibling ballot, no winner-announcement piece for the 2A class has surfaced anywhere in the site's public archive. The Class 3A vote produced a confirmed, named result in 2024. The 2A vote, drawing from roughly 48 programs, has not.

That silence is worth sitting with before anything else here. A fan poll and a state championship are two different contests, decided by two different mechanisms: one by a scoreboard in Cedar Falls, the other by whoever clicks a widget on si.com. For how these statewide polls generally work before the Class 2A specifics below, the online contest voting guide lays out the common ground.

Sorting the Class 2A ballot from Iowa's six other SI football polls

High School on SI does not stop at one Iowa football poll, or even two. It runs a separate ballot for each of the state's seven IHSAA classifications, an all-class combined vote that closes a month later, and a completely different multi-sport Athlete of the Week poll that runs weekly, year-round, across every sport Iowa plays. Landing on the wrong one is an easy mistake with seven near-identical URLs floating around si.com/high-school/iowa.

Football is not the only single-sport ballot the platform runs either. A separate Boys Soccer Player of the Year vote and a Class 1A Boys Basketball Player of the Year vote run on entirely separate calendars, unconnected to football's August-to-November window. Confusing one ballot for another is the single most common navigation mistake readers make on this hub.

The bottom two entries in that table play by different rules than the Class 2A ballot sitting above them. The weekly poll tells readers outright to vote as often as they want and names a winner, almost as an aside, inside the following week's article. The Class 2A ballot does neither in public. Whatever rule governs it lives only inside that one article, so the current text on the Athlete of the Week ballot is not a reliable stand-in for how this one behaves.

The mechanics of casting a vote in this specific ballot

Two windows repeat every year, the same shape the platform runs for all seven classes. A preseason article goes up in August, built off returning-starter buzz before a single snap is played. Then, once the playoffs settle at the UNI-Dome, a season-ending article opens with finalists drawn from what actually happened, closing near November 30.

No sign-up form. No CAPTCHA loop reported by readers. No app to download. Click a finalist inside the embedded widget and the vote registers immediately, with a running tally visible on the page for as long as the article stays live. That much matches the Class 3A ballot next door. What doesn't match is the follow-through — 3A got a named result; 2A, as far as the public record shows, did not.

Northwest Iowa's dynasty, a class-jumping upstart, and the rest of the 2A map

West Lyon does not just win occasionally in Class 2A. Five state titles now sit in Inwood, a Siouxland Conference town in Iowa's far northwest corner, and the 42-7 final over Spirit Lake in 2024 extended a run that the rest of the classification measures itself against. Spirit Lake, out of the Lakes Conference, has been the closest thing to a rival, reaching that same championship game and coming up short.

Van Meter is the more interesting story structurally. The program won back-to-back Class 1A titles before enrollment growth pushed it up into 2A — a rare case of a champion getting reclassified into tougher company rather than growing into it gradually. That alone makes every Van Meter season in this class worth watching, whether or not the program ever cracks this specific ballot.

Further out, Monroe-PCM carries the South Iowa Cedar League's flag in central Iowa. Carroll Kuemper, based in Carroll, has stayed a fixture of Missouri River Activities Conference playoff brackets for years. North Fayette Valley, out of West Union, and Decorah, both representing the Upper Iowa Conference, round out the tier's steadier northeast Iowa presence — Decorah's own run of four straight state titles between 2007 and 2010, three of them in Class 2A, predates most of this ballot's current finalists by well over a decade. Readers who arrived searching more broadly for "Iowa vote" rather than this one class specifically can browse the rest of the state's programs, football and otherwise, at the Iowa contest hub — non-sports entries like Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and Best of Des Moines from CITYVIEW included.

Building a real push for a Class 2A nominee

Getting a player onto this ballot happens before the article ever goes live. High School on SI's staff select finalists editorially, not through open public submission, so the practical lever a program has is visibility: box scores, playoff results, and season stat lines reaching the platform's attention through the athletic department's usual channels well before the piece is drafted.

Once a finalist is confirmed, distribute the exact article URL, not a screenshot and not just a headline. A Class 2A town runs smaller than a 5A metro, and that changes the math. A booster list of two or three hundred households in a place like Inwood or Carroll, where most families already know the roster by name, can put a link in front of nearly every relevant household in a single evening — something a sprawling suburban district needs weeks to approximate.

Because no vote-frequency rule has been published for this specific class ballot, pacing outreach evenly across the full window is the safer approach until an article's own text says otherwise. Programs that have exhausted their organic network and still see a real gap heading into the close sometimes turn to structured fan-poll vote support built for embedded widgets like this one; the same pacing caution applies whether the traffic started organic or paid. Broader tactics for these formats live in the how-to library, and the ground rules on what's actually permitted sit on the legality page.