Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Flint, Genesee County, and why the football culture here travels

Genesee County has been the center of Michigan's automotive economy and its collapse, its comeback stories, and its continuing reinvention. That history is not background noise to prep football here — it is the field the game is played on. Programs like Davison, Grand Blanc, and Flint Powers Catholic carry communities that have stayed connected through generations of alumni who moved away for work but never severed the tie to a team's Friday night. That connectivity is exactly what a fan-vote poll tests.

Confirmed 2024 winners Levi Lloyd of Swartz Creek and Austin Williams of Flushing both represent that community depth. Swartz Creek is a suburban Genesee County program with a consistent playoff presence in Division 2; Flushing is its neighbor and rival, also Division 2, with an alumni network that runs across the county. When either program has a player on a ballot, the vote is not just a school exercise — it moves through the kind of group texts and community Facebook pages that Genesee County maintains year-round.

Flint Powers Catholic, at Division 4, draws on a different network: a parochial alumni base that extends well beyond Genesee County into families who sent children to Powers for a generation. When Javontae Ross threw three touchdowns in a 47-0 shutout of Saginaw United in 2024 and made the ballot as one of eleven nominees, that school's network was the mechanism behind whatever vote total he built. Division size does not explain poll outcomes in Genesee County. Community connectivity does.

The Thursday close, and what it means for a Flint campaign

The most consequential fact about this poll for anyone trying to support a nominee is when it ends. The Flint-area MLive ballot closes Thursday morning — published Monday or Tuesday, closed by Thursday. That is a two-to-three-day window. The statewide Michigan poll run by High School on SI closes Sunday night, giving campaigns a full week. Anyone who carries habits from the SI poll into this one will be planning around a deadline that already passed.

The hourly cap shapes the campaign differently from an unlimited poll. Returning every hour through Wednesday night compounds into a meaningful total; a single device that votes once is done for an hour. A Swartz Creek or Flushing supporter who sets a reminder, votes before bed Monday, returns Tuesday morning, and keeps the rhythm through Wednesday is doing the actual work of this poll. The structure rewards sustained engagement over a concentrated push — which is the opposite of how most first-time supporters approach it.

Confirmed nominees and what the 2024 field reveals

Three names from the 2024 season are confirmed in available records. Two are winners: Levi Lloyd of Swartz Creek and Austin Williams of Flushing. One is a confirmed nominee: Javontae Ross of Flint Powers Catholic, who made a field of eleven after his three-touchdown performance against Saginaw United. No position or stat line is on public record for Lloyd or Williams — those details were not captured in accessible sources — so they are not filled in here.

What the record does show is the geographic spread. Swartz Creek and Flushing are adjacent programs in central Genesee County; Flint Powers Catholic is in the city itself. The ballot regularly draws from Genesee, Lapeer, and Shiawassee counties, with Davison and Grand Blanc — the area's largest Division 1 programs — among the programs whose players appear in nomination discussions most seasons. Week 1 of 2024 carried fourteen candidates, confirming that the field at the season's start is as wide as any week during the year.

One practical implication: with 11–14 nominees on most ballots, vote share is split more ways than on a six-name field. A plurality here is achievable at a lower absolute total than on a smaller ballot — but the hourly cap means that plurality builds across days rather than from a single push, and the Thursday morning close means those days are numbered from the moment the article posts. For how recurring MLive regional polls work more broadly, the Flint metro contest directory collects related polls, and the national directory is at /usa/.

Running a real campaign in the Flint-area poll window

Two levers move votes in this poll: getting the player onto the ballot, and sustaining the voting pace for two to three days before Thursday morning.

Getting onto the ballot starts with the Flint Journal sports desk. Brendan Savage covers the area and builds the field from weekend game reports and coach submissions. A stat line that reaches him by Sunday — player, school, position, the full performance, the opponent — gives the editors what they need before the article is set for Monday or Tuesday. A game that nobody surfaces can be missed even when the numbers would have made the field.

Once the article is live, the job is distributing the link through the actual networks that Genesee County football runs on: team group chats, booster page posts, and the extended alumni chains that programs like Powers Catholic and Davison maintain across the region and beyond. The hourly reset means each person in those networks can contribute across the window, not just once. A campaign that posts the link on Monday and goes quiet has done a fraction of what is available. One that nudges its network again Tuesday and Wednesday, with the Thursday close explicitly named, is using the structure the poll gives it.

Because the ballot is decided entirely by who reaches their people in the available window, structured vote-support campaigns exist for exactly this kind of regional poll — adding consistent volume across the hourly cadence where organic reach is slower to compound.