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

Two Kentucky football honors run at once, and they aren't the same thing

Say "Kentucky football Player of the Year" to three different people and you might get three different rankings back. That's because two separate honors close out the season at roughly the same time, built by two entirely different processes.

Sports Illustrated's High School on SI hub, running on SBLive's reporting infrastructure, opens a public fan poll at si.com/high-school/kentucky once the KHSAA playoffs wrap. Anyone can vote. Anyone can share the link. The Kentucky Football Coaches Association runs a completely different track: district-level Player of the Year honors, one per class and district, decided by the coaches themselves. No ballot, no public link, no vote count anybody outside the coaching fraternity ever sees.

A booster who spends a week mobilizing supporters for the SI/SBLive poll is doing nothing for the KFCA process, and vice versa: a program that wins its KFCA district honor gets zero benefit from that toward the statewide fan vote. Knowing which track you're actually chasing, before any campaign starts, matters more than most guides admit. For how the companion weekly ballot on the same SI/SBLive hub works, the Kentucky Football Player of the Week page covers that separate, in-season poll. Louisville's own Courier Journal Athlete of the Week is a third, still-different program run by a newspaper rather than SI/SBLive or the KFCA: three real Kentucky prep-sports ballots, three separate organizers, three sets of rules.

What the 2024 and 2025 results actually show

Real numbers exist for this one, which is rarer than it sounds for a statewide prep award. The 2024 statewide fan vote closed at 65.3% for the winning nominee out of 19,539 total votes cast, a decisive margin, not a photo finish. A program based in the Bowling Green area (South Warren) carried that season's honor. A margin above 65% on a field that typically runs several nominees deep says the winning campaign reached well past its own roster and immediate families.

2025 moved the honor west and north to an Owensboro-area program — different region, different fan base, same statewide mechanic. That shift alone tells you something the 65.3% figure can't: this isn't a poll one metro dominates by default. A Daviess County program reaching the top of a statewide field the year after a Warren County program did it means the vote genuinely travels. No 2025 vote-share percentage is published on the current page at si.com/high-school/kentucky, so treat the 19,539-vote 2024 figure as the only confirmed turnout benchmark until a fresh number is posted.

How the fan-vote side of the timeline works

SBLive's Kentucky staff doesn't build the Football Player of the Year field until the regular season and playoffs are actually finished. There's no mid-October ballot to find because it doesn't exist yet. Once the article publishes on si.com/high-school/kentucky, the poll widget sits inside it: click a nominee, submit, done. No account, no email, no app.

The KFCA side runs on its own clock entirely, tied to when district coaches meet and vote, and that process produces no public page to check. If a program's coach mentions a KFCA district honor, that's the only place most fans will hear about it before it shows up in local coverage.

What isn't published for this specific award

SBLive doesn't post a fixed per-device vote cap on the current Football Player of the Year article, and there's no searchable archive linking every past season's winner in one place. The honest approach (the one this page takes) is naming that gap rather than guessing a number. Check the live poll page at si.com/high-school/kentucky each cycle for whatever rule is actually stated that year; a prior season's terms aren't a safe assumption. The multi-sport Kentucky High School Player of the Year page, which covers this same fan-vote format across other sports, runs into the identical gap.

Why Bowling Green and Owensboro pull differently on this ballot

South Warren's 2024 win and the 2025 shift to an Owensboro-area program aren't a coincidence of two random towns. They reflect two of Kentucky's more tightly wound football communities, just built on different networks.

Warren County's high school football rivalry with Bowling Green High School keeps the region's fan attention locked on the sport every fall, and that baseline attention translates directly into poll turnout when a local program's nominee appears. 19,539 votes on a single statewide ballot is a real number, and a program pulling 65.3% of that field didn't get there on roster size alone.

Owensboro and the surrounding Daviess County programs draw on a different structure: a smaller media market where high school football functions as one of the primary weekend draws, with a booster and alumni network that runs through the same handful of churches, radio call-in shows, and community Facebook pages every fall. That kind of concentrated attention can move a statewide vote just as effectively as a bigger metro's larger, more diffuse fan base. Louisville's Trinity, St. Xavier, and Male carry the largest raw alumni numbers in the state, but neither of the last two confirmed statewide winners came from that metro. Worth noting before assuming market size decides this vote. See the Kentucky contest hub for how this award sits alongside the state's other fan-vote and readers-choice programs, including Best in Kentucky.

Running a campaign for the fan-vote side, honestly

Because the KFCA district honor has no public vote, there's nothing to campaign for there beyond the season a player actually puts on film. That decision belongs to coaches. The SI/SBLive statewide fan vote is the piece a program can actually mobilize supporters around, and the 2024 result gives a real target to plan against: 19,539 votes is the field's total, and 65.3% of that is what separated the winner from everyone else combined.

That kind of margin doesn't come from one household voting repeatedly. It comes from reach: the direct article link (not a vague mention of the award) landing in a booster club's email list, a team group chat, church bulletins, and the local Facebook groups that function as the real news feed in towns the size of Bowling Green or Owensboro. A campaign that starts the week the article publishes — not the week the deadline is rumored to hit — gets more of that 19,539-vote field before it settles.

Programs weighing whether to bring in outside help once the organic network is tapped out have options built for exactly this kind of open statewide poll. Our sports fan poll vote support and broader award-vote support both exist for this format; the general mechanics of running any fan-vote campaign are covered in our online voting guide, and the legal line between real supporter outreach and prohibited automation is laid out plainly at is buying votes legal before choosing any service.