Kentucky High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most Kentucky voters arrive not knowing

The Kentucky High School Football Player of the Week ballot closes Sunday night — not Monday. That single fact is worth knowing before anything else, because a supporter who assumes the poll runs until Monday loses an entire day of voting. SI's regional polls in Texas close Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific; this one does not. Saturday night through Sunday afternoon is when the Kentucky race is decided.

The second thing is that the ballot draws from across all six KHSAA classes without weighting them. Cameron Bulle of Glasgow — not a Louisville powerhouse — won the opening confirmed week of 2024 on 135 rushing yards and three touchdowns. Boyle County's Demauriah Brown and Franklin County's Easton Powell were named co-winners for the week of October 14–19. None of those programs are in the 6A Louisville bracket that tends to dominate casual football conversation in Kentucky. The ballot is statewide in fact, not just name.

What three 2024 ballots reveal about the nominee field

Three confirmed 2024 ballot weeks are on record. Taken together they sketch what a typical Kentucky POTW field looks like.

A few patterns stand out. Owensboro Catholic's Brady Atwell appeared on all three ballots — three separate weeks of the same season. The program produced standout performances consistently enough that the SBLive editors nominated the same player in August, September, and October. Graves County also appeared in all three confirmed weeks. And the field size fluctuated: 10, then 8, then 10 again — the nominee count is not fixed, which means any given week your candidate may be one of eight or one of ten.

The October 31 ballot fell during the run-up to the playoffs, and it shows how varied the competitive tier gets: a linebacker from Boyle County (4A dynasty), a quarterback from Highlands (Northern Kentucky staple), and a receiver from Graves County (western Kentucky) all on the same list alongside Louisville's Central High School.

Louisville metro versus the rest: how the community networks differ

Kentucky's football map is split in a way that shapes fan-poll campaigns more than program win-loss records do.

Louisville's 6A programs — Trinity, St. Xavier, Male — sit at one end. Trinity is the most decorated program in Kentucky football history, with roughly 30 state titles and three consecutive 6A championships through 2025. The school's annual game against St. Xavier draws 35,000-plus fans to Cardinal Stadium. When a Trinity or Male player appears on the weekly ballot, the Louisville metro's alumni network is among the largest absolute fan pools in the state. The trade-off, familiar in any large urban program, is that wide networks are slower to consolidate around a single link.

Northern Kentucky runs on a different axis. Covington Catholic and Highlands draw from communities that extend across the Ohio border into the Cincinnati metro. An alumni base that commutes north to Cincinnati or Dayton can still vote from Ohio — the ballot has no geographic restriction. A Covington Catholic campaign can activate former players now living in Hamilton County the same way it reaches families in Park Hills.

The smaller-class and regional programs — Boyle County in Danville, Graves County in Mayfield, Glasgow in Barren County — are the most centralized. In a town where the high school football program is the weekly social event, a single group text thread reaches most of the voting-age population. Cameron Bulle winning from Glasgow in the season opener is that dynamic made concrete: a smaller community turning out in full can out-pace a larger one that turns out at a fraction.

Running a real campaign before Sunday night

The Kentucky ballot opens Monday or Tuesday each week after SBLive reviews the weekend's stat lines, and closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. That is five or six days — but the practical window is shorter. Most casual traffic hits a ballot in the first two days; the tail end of the week belongs to whoever keeps pushing.

Getting your player onto the ballot starts before the poll is built. SBLive's editors compile nominees from game results, so submitting a complete performance record — yards, scores, opponent, final score, player position — as early as Saturday night gives the Kentucky team what it needs before Sunday morning nominations are set. A game that nobody flags can be missed even when the numbers deserved inclusion.

Once the ballot is live, the work is reach. Because the poll is uncapped and settles entirely on turnout by Sunday night, the most effective campaigns are the ones that widen the circle rather than cycling through the same few phones. Players texting their own networks, booster accounts posting mid-week and again Sunday morning, alumni groups in Louisville, Cincinnati, or Lexington getting one nudge before the evening close — that is the actual campaign structure the confirmed 2024 results suggest. For programs that want to supplement organic reach before the Sunday deadline, structured vote-support campaigns exist for this type of open weekly poll.

The multi-sport Kentucky Athlete of the Week runs year-round across all KHSAA sports on a parallel ballot. More Kentucky contests are indexed at /usa/kentucky/, and the full national directory is at /usa/.