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

What 51% and 21% both winning tells you about this poll

The two confirmed 2024 results are almost opposites — and together they describe exactly how the Kalamazoo ballot works. TJ Luteyn of Schoolcraft won Week 6 with 51%, a majority over 43 other nominees. Rocky Karsen of Lawton won Week 9 with 21% in a 34-player field where the vote split across the rest of the ballot. One winner consolidated; the other won a fragmented race. Neither needed the other's margin to claim the week.

What the numbers share is that both winners came from small Division 5 or 5-6 programs — not from Portage Central, Portage Northern, or Kalamazoo Central, the larger enrollment schools in the coverage area. That is not coincidence. Lawton and Schoolcraft are compact communities. A link to the poll reaches most of the relevant audience in one or two hops, not five. The larger metro programs have more people in absolute terms, but the smaller towns can move their community faster when the moment is clear.

The clearest strategic read from the data: a tight, coordinated school can reach majority; a well-liked player in a divided week can win with a fifth of the vote. The target number here is not fixed — it depends on how well the rest of the field mobilizes alongside you. Both confirmed 2024 winners came from Division 5 or 5-6 programs, not the larger metro schools, which tells you something real about which communities moved first.

How the ballot actually runs — platform, deadline, and field size

The poll lives inside an article on mlive.com/highschoolsports/kalamazoo/, not on a standalone voting page. MLive publishes the Player of the Week article Monday or Tuesday, and the poll.fm ballot is embedded in the body of that article. To vote, you find the article, scroll past the intro text, and click your nominee in the widget. Live percentages update as votes come in — so the standings are visible throughout the week.

The deadline is the critical variable. It is not the same day every week — confirmed Kalamazoo polls have closed on Thursday mornings and Friday afternoons in different seasons, and the article always states the exact time. A campaign that sends its final push on the wrong day loses votes it had already earned. Read the close time the same hour you find the article. Unlike the SI Texas regional polls, which run to a consistent Monday 11:59 p.m. Pacific, this ballot gives you no fixed anchor — the deadline is the first thing to pin down.

The 34-to-44 nominee range is the other number worth absorbing. With 44 players on the ballot, a winner at 51% drew more votes than the remaining 43 nominees combined. That concentration is rare in polls this large — it points to one school making a deliberate, coordinated push while the rest of the field spread across normal organic traffic.

Schoolcraft, Lawton, and what small-town southwest Michigan programs actually do here

The Kalamazoo coverage area runs from the Portage schools near the city center out to small rural programs in Cass, St. Joseph, and Van Buren counties. On a given week the ballot can include Portage Central — a Division 1-2 program drawing from a large suburban district — and Schoolcraft, a Division 5 school with a fraction of that enrollment. They are on the same list, competing for the same votes.

The 2024 data shows which type of school has actually won. Schoolcraft's Luteyn took Week 6 at 51%. Lawton's Karsen took Week 9 at 21%. Both schools sit in the Division 5 to 5-6 tier. Lawton also placed Chase Triemstra (6%) and Brady Quick (5%) on the Week 6 ballot in the same season — three separate players from one small program in a region-wide field. That kind of ballot presence across multiple cycles reflects a school with steady on-field production and a community that pays close enough attention to see it get nominated.

Mattawan provides a contrasting example. Troy Scarff appeared in both confirmed 2024 cycles — 7% in Week 6, runner-up at 16% in Week 9 — without winning either. Mattawan is a Division 2-3 program with a larger fan base in absolute terms. Scarff's repeat nominations show he was one of the region's best performers that season; the margins show that a wider fan base, spread across a larger geography, does not automatically produce a concentrated vote.

Portage Central and Portage Northern sit in Division 1-2, the top of the enrollment ladder for this coverage area. Neither has a confirmed POTW win in the 2024 data. The Kalamazoo ballot is one of the few Michigan polls where that fact is worth stating out loud — it is not that the big programs are absent from the field; it is that the confirmed winners are not coming from them. When the vote is fragmented across 34 names, 21% wins. When one community organizes while the others do not, 51% wins. Either way, the structural advantage belongs to the school that closes the gap between "nominated" and "everyone we know has voted." Campaigns that need to extend that reach quickly sometimes use vote support services built for open, uncapped fan polls of this format.