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

The thing most voters get wrong about this ballot

The Maine Football Player of the Week poll does not sort nominees by region or class. That is worth sitting with for a moment. A small co-op program from Aroostook County — one of the most rural corners of Maine, hours from Portland — lands on the exact same list as a school from southern Maine's biggest city. The Nov 5, 2024 ballot had Isaiah Ervin of the Houlton/Hodgdon/SAA/GHCA co-op alongside Portland's Aidan McGowan and Oceanside's Zeb Foster. One ballot, one state, no filters.

That structure means campaigns in Maine are not playing against their classification peers. They're playing against everyone SI nominated that week. A school in central Maine that thinks it only needs to out-mobilize its own classification peers is reading the wrong competition.

The second thing: SI does not publish raw vote totals. You will not see the margin. The only public record of a winner is the name that appears in the following week's poll introduction. Gavin Monyok of Hampden Academy is confirmed to have won Week 7 of the 2024 season — that confirmation came from the Nov 5, 2024 ballot's opening line. Hudson Lufkin of Dirigo won Week 5. Beyond those two, no public archive exists. Anyone telling you "it usually takes X votes to win" is estimating.

What Dirigo's wins actually reveal

Dirigo and Hampden Academy both produced confirmed SI Player of the Week winners in 2024, from very different corners of the state. The size of the school tells you nothing about ballot outcomes.

What the Dirigo data does tell you: a geographically tight community can consolidate. Lufkin won Week 5 of the 2024 SI poll, then came back and won the 929 Ticket "Fan's Star of the Season" for fall 2025 with a confirmed 1,063 votes on that separate poll. Two different platforms, two different voter bases, same school, same result. That is not luck — it's a community that knows how to activate quickly and keep going.

Compare that to a large program in the Greater Portland area. Larger absolute fan base, yes. But that base is distributed — alumni scattered, families busy, no single channel that reaches everyone at once. Getting a wide network to vote in the same 48-hour window is a logistics problem a small town does not have.

The 2024 ballots confirmed Spruce Mountain appeared across multiple weeks — Dylan Kewlett, Austin Armandi, and Owen Kelvey each earned nominations. But repeat nominations are not repeat wins. The week Lufkin won, Hampden's Kochendoerfer was on the same ballot. The margin is never published. What remains is the structural read: Dirigo organized. That is available information.

The confirmed ballot roster: who showed up, and what it means

Three 2024 poll ballots were directly verified. Across them, these schools had at least one nominee:

Spruce Mountain, from Jay in Franklin County, is the most-represented school across the three verified ballots — three different players nominated across three different weeks. Hampden, from Penobscot County in central Maine, also had three different players earn nods. Neither of those facts means they win more; it means their programs consistently produce the kind of individual performances that get editors' attention.

The co-op entry is worth noting separately. The Houlton/Hodgdon/SAA/GHCA program draws from multiple small schools in Aroostook County — Maine's largest county by area, thin in population. A co-op getting a player onto a statewide ballot confirms the editors look statewide, not just at the southern tier schools closest to press-row.

Running a real campaign in one week

The Sunday close matters more than it looks on a calendar. By the time most people realize a player they know made the ballot, half the week is already gone. The ballot goes up after the weekend's games; the competitive window runs Monday through Sunday night, and most casual fans will glance once and forget. A real campaign needs two things: early reach and a Sunday reminder.

Early reach means getting the link into the right channels in the first 24 hours — the team group chat, the booster Facebook page, the school's Instagram story. Not as a one-time announcement but as something people see more than once. In a state where smaller programs like Dirigo and Spruce Mountain consistently move through these ballots, the lesson is that tighter communities convert faster, not just louder ones.

Sunday is the closing stretch. By then, some campaigns have gone quiet. One more post Sunday morning, one more in the afternoon — that's the gap that gets exploited. The ballot accepts votes up to 11:59 p.m.; every hour through Sunday is live. A structured vote support campaign that runs through the deadline works precisely because the poll is open and uncapped until the moment it closes.

For how weekly fan votes work in general, the how-to guide covers the recurring cadence. More Maine contests — including the 929 Ticket Athlete of the Week and other statewide recognitions — are at /usa/maine/. The full national directory is at /usa/.