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

How reliable is the preseason pick in Iowa's Class 3A football vote?

Nobody has thrown a pass yet. That's the trap built into any preseason ballot, and High School on SI's Class 3A vote is no exception. The article goes up in August, before a single regular-season snap, asking Iowa fans to name the state's best Class 3A football player off returning-starter buzz and a coach's projection rather than a stat sheet.

The 2024 season is the clearest warning about how far that guess can drift from what actually happens. A Humboldt quarterback took Class 3A's season-ending fan vote, then the overall, all-classification Iowa Football Player of the Year vote outright, 64.71% of the tally. In that same year's title game, Humboldt lost 49-14 to Wahlert Catholic, a Dubuque program collecting its first football title in school history. The scoreboard and the fan vote didn't agree on a winner.

What the August ballot can measure, honestly, is reputation walking in the door: which programs enter a season already carrying a following large enough to show up and click. The season-ending Class 3A vote is where that reputation gets tested against what the team actually did. For how fan-vote polls like this one generally work before the Class 3A specifics, the online contest voting guide is a reasonable starting point.

Is the Class 3A preseason vote the same poll as the November one?

No. High School on SI runs a distinct article, a distinct URL, and a distinct closing date for each. The preseason edition for Class 3A opened in August; the 2025 cycle's window closed around August 24, before the regular season's first kickoff. A season-ending Class 3A article follows in November, built from real box scores instead of coaches' hunches, closing near November 30. Two ballots, same classification, months apart, and nothing about winning one guarantees anything on the other.

Iowa's Class 3A programs aren't limited to football, either, and mixing up the vote you're looking for with a different sport's ballot on the same platform is a common wrong turn. A boys soccer Player of the Year vote and a Class 1A boys basketball vote both run on si.com/high-school/iowa, on their own separate calendars, decided by their own separate fan bases.

That table only covers timing. The bigger difference is what each ballot actually measures. The August vote rewards a name fans already trust. The November vote rewards a season that already happened. They can land on the same program. Or they can land nowhere near each other; Class 3A's next cycle is the only way to find out which.

How does the Class 3A preseason vote actually work?

The mechanics run on the same si.com infrastructure as every other High School on SI class ballot, with one detail specific to this window: it opens and closes before the Class 3A season it's named for has played a single down.

That last row matters more here than on most SI ballots. The platform's weekly Athlete of the Week poll states outright that repeat voting is welcome. The Class 3A season-ending ballot shows a live tally but stays silent on frequency. The preseason edition hasn't published its own rule either way in what's confirmed so far, so the honest answer is to read the specific August article rather than assume a rule from a different SI poll carries over.

One practical wrinkle worth flagging: this ballot runs and closes in August, well before football season's audience is paying full attention each fall. Miss the close, and the next chance for that program isn't next week. It's the November edition, an entirely separate article with an entirely separate finalist pool.

Which Class 3A programs carry the most weight before a single game is played?

Harlan doesn't need a hot start to get preseason attention. Fourteen state championships, the most of any program in any Iowa classification, including a back-to-back Class 3A pair before the 2024 season. That record alone puts Harlan in the conversation every summer, regardless of who's actually back on the roster.

Wahlert Catholic changed the calculus in 2024. A Dubuque parish school with no prior football title walked out of the UNI-Dome having beaten Humboldt 49-14 for its first one. A program with a fresh trophy and a real parish-and-alumni network behind it enters the next preseason cycle carrying momentum that Harlan's history-based reputation doesn't need, and that Wahlert Catholic, until 2024, never had.

Humboldt is the harder case to explain in one line. A North Central Conference program that lost the actual championship game still produced the fan vote's biggest story of the season, its nominee taking both the Class 3A vote and the overall statewide crown. Whatever built that turnout evidently didn't need a trophy to show up.

Further west and south, three more programs round out the tier's more consistent contenders: Iowa City Regina out of the Iowa City market, Sergeant Bluff-Luton in the Missouri River Activities Conference, and Lewis Central down in Council Bluffs. Three different media markets, three different definitions of what counts as local coverage for a Class 3A nominee trying to get noticed in August. 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."

How do you actually campaign for a nominee during a summer vote?

August works against you before you even start. Families are wrapping up vacations, fall camp has barely opened, and the season-long drumbeat of highlight clips and box scores that fuels a November campaign simply doesn't exist yet in July and August. Whatever case gets made for a Class 3A preseason nominee has to run on last season's tape and a coach's reputation, not this week's stat line.

Because High School on SI builds this ballot editorially rather than through open submission, the actual lever available to a program is visibility reaching the right desk before the article gets drafted: returning-starter numbers, last year's playoff run, anything that gives an editor a reason to include that program's nominee in a short August field.

Once the article is live, the move that moves numbers is the same one that works on every SI class ballot: sharing the exact article link, not a screenshot and not just a school name, through booster email lists, alumni group texts, and parish or community networks built up over years. For Wahlert Catholic, that network runs through Dubuque parish ties. For Harlan, it's fourteen championships' worth of alumni built up over decades, not assembled overnight. Pacing that outreach evenly across the August window, rather than dumping it all in one day, is the safer approach given the ballot hasn't published its own frequency rule.

Programs that have already worked their organic network and still see a gap before the close sometimes look at structured fan-poll vote support built for embedded ballots like this one. Broader tactics for these formats live in the how-to library, and the actual ground rules on what's permitted sit on the legality page.