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

The two small-school ballots even the platform mixes up

Iowa's smallest football programs get two separate ballots on High School on SI, not one. Class A covers the state's smallest eleven-player schools; a wholly separate 8-Player ballot covers programs fielding eight players per side rather than eleven, built for an even smaller enrollment band. Even the site's own web addresses blur the line: the 2025 preseason article covering Class A finalists carries a URL that reads "class-8-player-preseason" in its slug, while the page's own headline says "Class A." That's a small, confirmed detail, but a useful one — a shared link or a search result can point to a page whose address doesn't match what it's actually about.

The mix-up has a logical cause. Class A sits directly next to the 8-Player tier on Iowa's enrollment ladder: Class A runs roughly under 175 students, 8-Player starts around 105 or by exemption. One tier plays the standard game with a smaller roster to draw from; the other plays a genuinely different format built for schools too small to field eleven. High School on SI's editorial team assembles each ballot by hand every cycle, and the two labels have apparently collided in at least one confirmed URL.

The 2024 season ballot named two confirmed finalists. One represented the program that went on to win that November's actual Class A state title, a 14-10 decision in the UNI-Dome final and the program's first football championship in its history. No public results page names an overall Class A vote winner separate from that finalist list; the confirmed record stops there. For how these SI ballots generally work before the Class A specifics, the online contest voting guide covers the underlying mechanics.

Where the Class A ballot sits among Iowa's other football polls

Class A is one of eight separate football ballots High School on SI runs across an Iowa season: seven classification-specific votes running 5A down through 8-Player, plus one overall cross-class Player of the Year vote. Add the year-round Athlete of the Week poll, which covers every sport rather than just football, and knowing which ballot is live matters more here than it does in a state running a single statewide vote.

That last row is worth flagging on its own. The year-round Athlete of the Week ballot never shows a running count at all; the tally stays hidden until the following Monday. The Class A season ballot runs the opposite way: the number sits visible on the page as votes land, yet nothing in the article's own text spells out a per-hour or per-day limit. A supporter used to one SI poll's rules can misjudge how a different one on the same domain actually behaves.

What's confirmed about how the Class A vote actually runs

The 2024 Class A ballot lived at a dedicated si.com article, syndicated in parallel on Yahoo Sports, which extended the poll's reach past Sports Illustrated's own traffic. Two windows apply to the format generally: an August preseason edition built from coaches' early-season projections, and a season-ending edition that opens once the November playoffs settle at the UNI-Dome.

No sign-up form and no reported CAPTCHA step stand between a reader and a submitted vote. Click a finalist inside the embedded widget and the total on the page updates right away, a different experience from the weekly poll, where the running number stays out of view until a winner gets named. When sharing this specific ballot, send the si.com link. The Yahoo Sports mirror carries the same article text but doesn't reliably host a working copy of the widget itself.

Small-town programs, one shared stage at the UNI-Dome

Class A draws from Iowa's smallest towns running standard eleven-player football, communities where the roster overlaps heavily with the graduating class and the schedule gets taped to the wall of the one gas station in town. Tri-Center, based in Neola in southwest Iowa, took the 2024 Class A title in a 14-10 decision over West Hancock, out of Britt in the North Iowa Conference. It was the winning program's first football championship in its history, settled by a single defensive stop late in the fourth quarter.

The rest of the tier's regular contenders come from every corner of the state. Guthrie Center, competing under the ACGC cooperative in the Raccoon River Valley Conference, opened the 2024 season ranked among the class's top programs. Saint Ansgar, in the Top of Iowa East Conference near the Minnesota border, has built a reputation as one of the tier's steadier year-over-year contenders. Lisbon, playing out of the Cedar Valley Conference in eastern Iowa, rounds out the group. Three separate conferences. Three separate media markets. One shared classification.

That geographic spread is the whole point of a statewide fan vote. A finalist from Neola and a finalist from Lisbon never play each other during the regular season; the only place their supporters actually compete head-to-head is inside the poll widget. For where Class A fits into the state's broader fan-vote landscape, the Iowa contest hub tracks every active ballot, sport and otherwise, including the boys soccer Player of the Year vote and the Class 1A boys basketball ballot running on the same platform.

Getting a finalist onto the ballot, then winning the window

Nothing about the Class A ballot works through open public submission. High School on SI's editorial staff builds the finalist list from season performance: box scores, playoff results, and whatever stat lines have already reached the platform through normal media channels. A standout season in a town without a full-time sports reporter can go unnoticed if nobody sends the numbers in. Visibility, more than raw production, decides who gets a spot.

Once a finalist is confirmed, the lever that actually moves a small-class total is reach, not repetition. Class A towns run on tight networks: a single booster Facebook group, a church bulletin, a text chain that includes half the town's adult population. A community of a few hundred residents that gets the exact article link in front of everyone who cares can post a competitive number inside a single evening. A school pulling from a scattered alumni base spread across three states needs more time, and more channels, to match it.

Because the ballot hasn't published a vote-frequency rule the way the platform's weekly poll has, spreading outreach evenly across the full window is the safer approach until an article's own text says otherwise. A finalist's own town can only produce so many votes before November 30 arrives, and for campaigns that reach that ceiling, structured fan-poll vote support designed around embedded widgets like this one is worth knowing about as a later option, not a first move. The legality page lays out what's actually permitted before committing any budget, and the how-to library has broader tactics that extend past this one contest. The wider USA contest index maps every state's version of this same fan-vote format, including non-sports programs like Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and Best of Des Moines from CITYVIEW.