Iowa High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is Iowa High School Athlete of the Week on High School on SI?

The Iowa High School Athlete of the Week is a free statewide fan poll published weekly at si.com/high-school/iowa by High School on SI — the prep-sports vertical of Sports Illustrated that absorbed the former SBLive Sports platform. Every week of the Iowa sports calendar, the editorial team nominates standout athletes from across the full width of the state, then opens a public vote so Iowa fans can decide the winner. No subscription, account, or registration is required.

• Run by High School on SI (Sports Illustrated), which took over the SBLive prep-sports network and operates all-50-state athlete-of-the-week programmes.
• Coverage spans all Iowa IHSAA conferences and classifications — from the large-school MVC and CIML to smaller Iowa Alliance, MRAC, and Hawkeye Ten Conference schools.
• Voting closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT each active week; polls are published mid-week after editors review preceding-week results from across Iowa.
• Sports covered include football, volleyball, cross country, soccer, basketball, wrestling, swimming, track and field, baseball, softball, tennis, and golf — the full Iowa IHSAA-sanctioned calendar.
• Unlike metro-market newspaper polls centred on a single city, this award draws nominees from Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Cedar Falls, Dubuque, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, and every region in between.
• The prize is published recognition on a national Sports Illustrated domain — a permanent si.com archive entry that shows up when coaches and recruiters search an Iowa athlete's name.

The statewide scope of this poll makes it fundamentally different from a single-metro newspaper contest. A Cedar Rapids Kennedy athlete competes against a Sioux City East athlete, a Cedar Falls nominee, and a Council Bluffs Lincoln standout — all in the same poll, in the same week. That breadth means every campaign must reach beyond a single school's booster list and activate the broader Iowa athletics community.

Which Iowa schools and conferences compete in this statewide poll?

Because the Iowa High School Athlete of the Week draws from the entire state, the nominee pool reaches into every corner of Iowa's IHSAA competitive structure. The table below lists representative schools by conference and region — these are schools that regularly appear in the weekly nominee pool, drawn from confirmed si.com Iowa poll archives through 2025–2026.

Conference geography across Iowa

The Mississippi Valley Conference is the largest conference in eastern Iowa, anchoring Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, the Waterloo–Cedar Falls corridor, the Quad Cities, and Dubuque. The MVC splits into Mississippi and Valley divisions and governs some of Iowa's most competitive basketball, wrestling, and football programmes. Cedar Rapids Kennedy, Iowa City West, and Cedar Falls have historically been among the strongest MVC programmes in terms of state-title production across multiple sports.

The Central Iowa Metro League (CIML) covers nine large Des Moines-area public and private schools — Ankeny, Ankeny Centennial, Dowling Catholic, Johnston, Southeast Polk, Urbandale, Valley, Waukee, and Waukee Northwest — representing the highest per-school enrolment concentration in Iowa. The Iowa Alliance Conference formed in 2022–23 from schools that left the CIML, including Ames, Fort Dodge, Marshalltown, and Mason City, covering central and north-central Iowa. The Missouri River Athletic Conference (MRAC) governs competitive programmes in western Iowa along the Nebraska border.

How does voting for Iowa High School Athlete of the Week work?

Each week's Iowa poll is published as a standalone article on si.com/high-school/iowa — the article title follows the format "Vote: Who Should be Iowa's High School Athlete of the Week?" with the date in the headline and URL slug. The poll widget is embedded within that article. No login, email address, or account of any kind is needed to vote.

What is the voting window?

Iowa polls close at 11:59 p.m. PT on Sunday, as confirmed across multiple 2025 and 2026 si.com Iowa poll articles. The open date varies — polls typically appear mid-week after editors compile results from the prior weekend's Iowa competitions. Because each week's poll lives in a new URL, the only reliable way to find the current active poll is to open si.com/high-school/iowa and look for the most recently published athlete-of-the-week article at the top of the page.

Unlike some regional newspaper polls (such as the Des Moines Register's hourly-cap format), the High School on SI platform does not publish a per-device hourly reset rule for the Iowa poll. The mechanic is a single-window open vote — all submissions count toward the total until Sunday close, with reach across a broader Iowa audience being the primary driver of competitive totals.

The poll is accessible on all standard desktop and mobile browsers. No app download is required — Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android, and desktop browsers all render the SI poll widget correctly. Iowa supporters anywhere in the country — or internationally — can vote just as easily as fans local to the nominee's school.

How is the Iowa Athlete of the Week winner decided?

The winner is the Iowa nominee with the highest vote total when the poll closes Sunday night. High School on SI controls only the nomination stage — selecting which athletes appear on the ballot based on outstanding performances reported during the week — but the outcome is determined entirely by accumulated fan votes. There is no editorial score added to the vote count, no panel override, and no tie-break mechanism other than the vote tally itself.

1. Performance reporting: Iowa coaches, parents, and school athletic contacts flag standout performances to the High School on SI editorial team, typically by contacting the Iowa sports staff with stats, game context, and a brief performance summary.
2. Ballot curation: editors select the Iowa nominee list based on journalistic judgement — not every submission earns a spot, and the desk balances representation across sports and regions of Iowa.
3. Fan vote opens: the poll goes live at si.com/high-school/iowa mid-week; any visitor can vote freely until Sunday 11:59 p.m. PT.
4. Winner announced: the Iowa nominee with the most votes is named Athlete of the Week in the following week's article — a permanent record on the Sports Illustrated platform archive.

High School on SI explicitly describes its polls as a community-engagement feature with no formal awards unless specifically announced. The value is the recognition itself: a published mention on a national Sports Illustrated domain, permanently searchable and citable in recruiting materials, college applications, and media profiles.

Getting more votes for your Iowa High School Athlete of the Week nominee

The Iowa High School on SI poll rewards breadth — the more distinct real people across Iowa who reach the si.com poll before Sunday close, the higher the total climbs. Because there is no hourly per-device reset, the decisive variable is how many Iowa supporters receive the direct poll link and act on it. When community outreach has been fully activated and the nominee still trails, our sports fan poll votes service can deliver additional paced, genuine votes before the Sunday deadline.

Iowa's geographic spread creates both a challenge and an opportunity. An athlete from Dubuque Senior or Pleasant Valley in Bettendorf is drawing votes from eastern Iowa communities that have no awareness of competitors from Sioux City or Fort Dodge — and vice versa. That regional fragmentation means statewide reach, not just local depth, is the competitive edge. Sharing the poll on Iowa prep-sports Facebook pages that span the whole state (Iowa High School Sports, IHSAA-following fan groups) gives a nominee exposure across regions that local-only outreach cannot reach.

For a full breakdown of how vote totals are built for fan polls in general, see our guide to online contest voting. The Iowa-specific pattern here is that statewide reach consistently outweighs concentrated local effort — an athlete whose community activates parents, teachers, and alumni across all of Iowa's diverse metro areas will outperform one whose campaign is limited to a single school's immediate network.

What are the rules — and can you buy votes for Iowa High School Athlete of the Week?

The Iowa High School Athlete of the Week is a consumer fan-engagement poll — not a regulated commercial sweepstakes under Iowa prize-promotion law and not a formal athletic competition under IHSAA jurisdiction. There is no entry fee, no cash prize, and no legal framework governing participation beyond the poll platform's own terms of service.

Two categories of activity are meaningfully different for this Iowa poll:

• Automated bot submissions — programmatic voting tools that inject rapid-fire requests, circumvent platform controls, and produce unnatural traffic patterns. These are contrary to standard poll terms and detectable by the platform.
• Paid outreach to real voters — real Iowa supporters and general online voters who cast genuine votes through the normal poll interface. Structurally, this resembles a booster club distributing the link to a large email list — it is fans voting, reached via a paid channel rather than an organic one.

Whether that distinction satisfies the spirit of the High School on SI poll terms is a judgement each Iowa entrant must make after reading the current official poll page. In a no-prize fan poll with no formal contest-law framework, the practical consequence of flagged votes is exclusion from the tally. The reputational consideration — that the community would see the final count was adjusted — is the real risk to weigh. For context on how online contest vote promotion works across the full range of fan polls, see our detailed guide.

Iowa High School Athlete of the Week season timeline — IHSAA calendar

The Iowa High School on SI poll tracks the IHSAA and IGHSAU sports calendar, publishing weekly throughout each active season. Iowa's athletic year is distinctive: the state has three well-defined seasons, and high school baseball and softball extend into late June and early July — a longer spring window than most states. Summer polls have also appeared in the Iowa SI archive for July off-season performances.

Iowa wrestling deserves specific mention as a statewide poll factor. Iowa is consistently one of the top two or three states in the country for high school wrestling depth — programmes at Iowa City West, Cedar Falls, Linn-Mar, Waukee Northwest, and Fort Dodge Senior have produced state champions in the same weight class in consecutive years. Wrestling nominees in winter polls often draw intense, organised community support from the multi-generational wrestling culture embedded in Iowa high school athletics.

For a broader view of Iowa prep-sport fan polls and how they interact with the state's voting contest ecosystem, see our Iowa voting contests hub. For the full US contest guide across all 50 states, visit the USA contest index.