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

The small-town identity behind Iowa's Class 2A football vote

Northwest Iowa runs this ballot's clock. West Lyon, out of the small Lyon County town of Inwood, has won five state football championships, the most recent a 42-7 rout of Spirit Lake that closed out the 2024 season. That's a Siouxland Conference program built on a graduating class you could fit in a school gym, not a suburban district running three feeder middle schools.

Class 2A is Iowa's fourth-largest of seven IHSAA football tiers, roughly 48 schools under the 2025-26 cutoffs, and the preseason ballot High School on SI runs each August pulls from towns cut from the same cloth statewide: Spirit Lake up on the Iowa Great Lakes, Kuemper Catholic down in Carroll, North Fayette Valley in the state's north. Nobody on this ballot is playing in front of ten thousand people on a Friday night.

Van Meter tells a stranger version of the same small-school story. The Heart of Iowa Athletic Conference program won back-to-back Class 1A titles in 2022 and 2023, then moved up a class, arriving in the 2A field carrying a championship habit few programs in this tier can claim yet. For how these fan-vote polls generally work before the Class 2A specifics, the online contest voting guide covers the mechanics that apply across every state on the SI platform.

What the 2024 season already showed about this ballot's blind spots

Nobody knows who won the Class 2A fan vote in 2024. High School on SI published the article and ran the poll, but no winner announcement for that specific ballot turned up anywhere in the research behind this page. Worth saying plainly rather than glossing over: the record for last year's season-ending Class 2A vote is incomplete, and this August's preseason edition inherits that same gap going in.

What is confirmed is the finalist pool. One 2024 nominee, a defensive lineman, carried 14.5 sacks and 20 tackles for loss into the vote. Another, a quarterback, passed for 1,455 yards at better than 70 percent completion with 20 touchdowns against 2 interceptions, then added 576 rushing yards and 11 more scores on the ground himself. Big numbers. Unresolved outcome.

The season itself did resolve, on the field if not in the poll: West Lyon beat Spirit Lake 42-7 for the championship, the program's fifth state title. Whether that nominee, or that program's supporters, also carried the online vote isn't something SI's coverage settled. Anyone guessing at 2025 is guessing without knowing how 2024's own vote actually landed — a different kind of blind spot than most preseason polls admit to. The season-ending Class 2A vote page tracks that separate ballot on its own cycle.

How the Class 2A preseason ballot actually runs, week to week

The infrastructure is identical to every other class High School on SI covers, just addressed to Class 2A specifically. One article, one embedded widget, one closing date, all housed at si.com/high-school/iowa.

That last row carries more weight here than people expect. SI's weekly, multi-sport Athlete of the Week poll tells readers outright that repeat voting is welcome. The season-ending Class 2A ballot shows a running tally but says nothing about frequency. This preseason edition hasn't stated a rule either way in anything confirmed so far, so carrying last year's assumption into this year's vote is a mistake worth avoiding.

Football isn't the only Class 2A conversation on this platform, either. A boys soccer Player of the Year vote and a Class 1A boys basketball vote both run on si.com/high-school/iowa too, each on its own calendar and its own fan base. Landing on the wrong sport's article while searching for this one is an easy mistake in August, when several preseason pieces publish within days of each other.

One more wrinkle: August is a quiet month for Iowa high school football attention. Fall camp has barely opened, most families are finishing summer plans, and the audience that will be fully locked into Friday nights by October simply isn't paying attention yet. Miss the close around August 24, and the next chance for that program isn't a rematch. It's a separate article in November, built from a season that, by then, has actually been played.

Which Class 2A programs carry weight before a single snap is played

Reputation walks in the door first on an August ballot, and in Class 2A that reputation sits unevenly across a handful of programs with real title histories behind them.

Decorah is the outlier worth a second look. Four state titles in a row, 2007 through 2010, three of them won in Class 2A before the fourth arrived after a bump to Class 3A. A run like that doesn't repeat easily in the same tier, and it means Decorah's name still carries weight on this ballot even in a year when the current roster gives no particular reason to expect it.

Geography does some of the remaining work. West Lyon and Spirit Lake sit within roughly an hour of each other in the state's northwest corner, both drawing on lake-country and farm-town communities that read the same regional papers and catch the same Friday-night radio call. A voter base that already follows both programs every fall doesn't need much prompting to click on an August article about either one. The Iowa contest hub maps the rest of the state's fan-vote programs, including non-sports contests like Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes and CITYVIEW's Best of Des Moines, for anyone who landed here searching more broadly for "Iowa vote."

What actually moves votes for a Class 2A nominee in August

Small-school Iowa runs on a shorter chain of command than a big suburban district, and that's the real edge here. A booster club in a town the size of Inwood or Spirit Lake can reach most of its realistic voter base through two or three phone calls and one post in the town's community Facebook group — not a multi-layer PR push.

Because High School on SI builds this ballot editorially, not through open nomination, the first lever is getting a program noticed before the article is drafted: last season's record, a coach's returning-starter list, anything that gives an editor a reason to include that program in a short August field. Kuemper Catholic and North Fayette Valley, without a recent state title to lean on, need that outreach more than West Lyon does.

Once the article goes live, sharing the actual si.com link, not a screenshot and not just a school name, through booster email chains, county fair connections, and church or civic group pages is what moves numbers in a town where half the readers already half-know the roster. Pace it across the full window rather than dumping every share on day one; the ballot hasn't published a frequency rule, so steady, even outreach reads safer than a single burst.

Programs that have worked their own network fully and still see a gap before the close sometimes look at fan-poll vote support built for embedded ballots like this one. The how-to library covers broader tactics for this ballot format, and the legality page lays out what's actually permitted before anyone spends money on it.