WZZM13 Grand Rapids High School MVP of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The deadline nobody reads until it is too late

Most people who discover the WZZM13 MVP of the Week poll find out about the Thursday close the wrong way: they plan to vote Thursday night and it is already over. The ballot shuts at 5:30 p.m. — not midnight, not end of day, but early evening — because WZZM13 announces the winner in its Thursday newscast. That is not an administrative detail. It reshapes the entire week's campaigning.

Every other weekly poll in West Michigan runs through the weekend. The MLive Grand Rapids Athlete of the Week closes Sunday. The SI Michigan statewide ballot closes Sunday. This ballot's active window is roughly 60 to 80 hours — Monday or Tuesday when the article posts, to Thursday at 5:30 p.m. The last meaningful push window is Wednesday night. Anyone treating Thursday as campaign day has already lost most of it.

That compression is the single most important thing to understand about this poll. Everything that follows — how nominees get on the ballot, which schools tend to move votes, what the confirmed performances look like — runs inside that constraint.

What the confirmed nominees tell us about this market

Three full performances are on record from the 2024 football season. Week 1 nominees were Grayson Fellows — 236 passing yards and 3 touchdowns — and Riley Smith as a co-nominee; school affiliations were not reported in available records. Week 3 brought Liam Leek of Whitehall with 241 rushing yards and 2 touchdowns. Week 7 had Landon O'Donnell of Spring Lake with 6 touchdowns in a single game against Forest Hills Eastern.

The geography matters. Whitehall sits on the Muskegon coast, roughly an hour from downtown Grand Rapids. Spring Lake is an Ottawa County lakeshore town of about 2,500 residents. Neither is a large suburban school. The fact that both appeared on a ballot covering the full West Michigan metro — which includes Rockford, Grand Rapids Catholic Central, West Catholic, and Caledonia — tells you something about how the WZZM13 editors define their territory: it is wider than the immediate Grand Rapids suburbs, and smaller-town programs from the lakeshore corridor are legitimate nominees, not novelties.

On the basketball side, the 2025-26 season introduced the first-ever winter MVP ballot. A February 2026 nominee reached 1,000 career points in his featured game. Because the basketball ballot is new, there is no multi-season history to benchmark typical vote totals against — which cuts both ways. Campaigns in basketball's first year are working without a baseline, but so is everyone else.

How the West Michigan network actually moves votes before Thursday

Grand Rapids metro high school sports draw on a distinct social topology that is worth knowing before building a campaign here. West Michigan's school communities — particularly the lakeshore towns like Spring Lake and Whitehall, and the Catholic programs like West Catholic and Grand Rapids Catholic Central — are tighter and more centralized than the sprawling suburban networks around a larger city like Detroit or Lansing. A Spring Lake parent group text reaches a large fraction of the voting-age community in one afternoon. That density is an asset when the deadline is Thursday at 5:30 p.m.

Larger suburban programs like Rockford carry more raw supporters but wider, looser networks. A poll link shared in a Rockford boosters group travels through more layers before it converts. That is not a disadvantage in an uncapped weekend poll where there is time to let the message spread — but in a three-day window that closes Thursday afternoon, distributed networks lose ground to centralized ones unless somebody is actively pushing each day.

The practical schedule: get the ballot link into team group chats Monday evening when the article posts. Send a reminder Tuesday to any network that has not yet engaged. Wednesday night is the last full-push window. Thursday morning is a final reminder only — votes after 5:30 p.m. Thursday do not count, and there is no recovery window.

Nominations are a separate step: submit to [email protected] with "MIHSAW Nomination" in the subject, including the full stat line and opponent, by Monday to give the editors time to include the player in the current week's ballot. A strong game that nobody flags can miss the field entirely.

Because the window here is shorter than any other Michigan weekly poll, vote-support campaigns timed to the Wednesday evening push tend to have more impact than the same volume spread across a seven-day ballot. For how regional fan polls work more broadly, the how-to guide covers the weekly cadence. More Michigan contests are at /usa/michigan/ and the full national directory is at /usa/.