New Orleans Area Prep Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Thursday noon wall — what it actually does to campaigns

Most people who follow Louisiana prep football know the NOLA.com Player of the Week exists. Fewer understand what the Thursday noon close means in practice. This is not a Sunday-night poll that gives you a full week of casual sharing. The article goes live Monday or Tuesday; the ballot shuts at noon Thursday. That is 60 to 72 hours, and those hours mostly fall on school days.

Consider what that means for a program trying to mobilize. The weekend is over. Students are in class Monday through Wednesday. The only real push windows are Monday evening, all day Tuesday, and Wednesday — with a hard stop at noon before most people's lunch break on Thursday. A school that wakes up Thursday morning and starts sharing is working inside the last two hours of a race that was effectively decided the day before.

This deadline structure changes the kind of community that wins. A program that has a tight, connected booster network — one that can route a link through phone chains and school-specific group chats in 24 hours — is better positioned than a larger school whose wide but loosely organized fan base takes three days to warm up. In New Orleans metro football, that description fits the Catholic-league schools almost exactly. Brother Martin, Rummel, and John Curtis run alumni networks that span generations of New Orleans families; a call to action that hits on Monday night can reach former players living across the country before Tuesday morning.

That is not an abstraction. The Week 8, 2025 ballot included London Padgett of John Curtis — a school whose alumni network (River Ridge, Jefferson Parish, and well beyond) activates quickly around prep sports news. It also included Donny Lawrence of St. Martin's Episcopal, a smaller private program in Jefferson Parish with a dedicated, close-knit parent and alumni base. Neither school is Edna Karr or Destrehan in terms of total enrollment. But enrollment is not what closes polls before noon on Thursday.

What the Week 8, 2025 ballot reveals about this market

Ten nominees in a single week is a deep field for a single metro. The statewide SI Louisiana ballot pulls from the whole state — its Sept. 22, 2025 edition listed 35 nominees across every region — but NOLA.com's Week 8, 2025 ballot drew ten names from the five-parish New Orleans area alone, and the range of what earned a nomination tells you something about how the editors evaluate the metro's talent pool.

Three things stand out. First, Kaiden Thomas of Willow posted the highest raw yardage in the field — 446 passing yards — and still shared the ballot with eight other nominees. The editors are not running a pure stats competition; they are picking representative performances from across the metro's parishes. Second, Frank Pierre of Kennedy made the list on defense alone — two interceptions and a return touchdown, no offensive stat in sight. Schools with dominant defensive backs or playmaking return men should not self-select out of the nomination process. Third, John Johnson of Edna Karr threw for 338 yards and 6 touchdowns on 10-of-14 passing during a season when Karr was building toward a Division I Select state title and a 27-game win streak. That kind of performance on a championship-caliber team draws a natural voter base — but it was one of ten names on a ballot where turnout, not pedigree, decides.

How the Catholic League and public schools share the same ballot

Louisiana's LHSAA classification system splits schools into Select (private and parochial) and Non-Select (public) divisions. In every playoff game, those pools are separate. On the NOLA.com ballot, they are not.

The Week 8 field put Edna Karr, John Curtis, Rummel, St. Augustine, St. Martin's, and St. Charles — all Select programs — alongside McDonogh 35, Destrehan, Kennedy, Willow, and St. Charles Parish's own public schools. That mix is what makes the New Orleans metro poll structurally different from, say, the SI statewide ballot, where a nominee from Shreveport competes with a nominee from Baton Rouge and a nominee from the New Orleans area simultaneously. Here, the entire field draws from the same five-parish geography.

And in this geography, the Catholic schools carry a particular organizing advantage. Schools like St. Augustine — which plays on Press Drive in the Gentilly neighborhood and draws a community rooted in Orleans Parish's Black Catholic tradition — or Brother Martin on Chef Menteur Highway have alumni networks that do not really decay with distance. A Purple Knights alumnus in Atlanta still knows when St. Aug is on the ballot. That is not a factor in public school fan organizing at the same scale. It is part of why the Thursday noon deadline and the Catholic League community structure interact the way they do in this specific market.

For voters who want to support a public program — McDonogh 35 in the Seventh Ward, Kennedy in Algiers, Destrehan across the river in St. Charles — the window and the network mechanics are the same: Monday and Tuesday are the days, and the group-chat chain is the mechanism. What changes is the starting size of that network and how fast it reaches people who have moved away.

Running a real campaign in a 60-hour window

Getting a player onto the ballot is the first step. Christopher Dabe handles nominations at [email protected]; the deadline is 5 p.m. Sunday. A submission that arrives Sunday afternoon with the full stat line, the opponent and score, and the school name is the one that gets evaluated. A game that does not get flagged to the editors does not get on the ballot, regardless of how impressive it was.

Once the ballot is live, the math is simple and the window is short. Reach matters more than repetition. Sending the same voters back to reload a page moves the number less than finding 200 new voters who have not seen the link. The target audience for a New Orleans metro campaign is not random internet traffic; it is the specific community attached to the school — current families, alumni chapters, booster groups, former players now in college or working in the city. That audience can be reached on Tuesday morning. It is much harder to reach at 10 a.m. Thursday.

For a school that wants to extend its reach beyond its organic network, vote-support campaigns are available for open fan polls of this type. Because the Thursday noon close compresses the useful delivery window, planning for that earlier in the week matters. The how-to guide covers the general mechanics of weekly recurring fan-vote campaigns. The broader guide at Louisiana high school sports polls covers the statewide SI ballot and the other regional contests in the state, and the full directory of fan-vote polls across the country is at /usa/.