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

The thing most supporters miss about this ballot

The Minnesota High School on SI football poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Central Time. That single fact is underestimated by most campaigns because supporters from outside Minnesota — college teammates, alumni in other states, extended family — often run their Sunday-night push on Pacific time. An 11 p.m. PT reminder lands after the Minnesota ballot has already closed. Getting that time zone into every message your campaign sends is not a detail; it is the difference between Sunday votes that count and Sunday votes that don't.

The second thing worth knowing is the ballot size. Confirmed 2025 polls ran 13–19 nominees per week — the Sep 8 poll alone listed 16 players from programs as varied as St. Croix Lutheran, Wabasso, Perham, Mankato East, and Maple Grove. That breadth is unusual for a state football poll. It means the vote splits further each week, and a community that turns out in a concentrated burst can take a decisive share against a fragmented field. The structure rewards organization over raw numbers.

What the 2025 winners actually reveal

Four confirmed winners from the 2025 season offer a clearer picture of how this ballot runs than any general description could.

Brian White III of White Bear Lake won on a performance that came in a loss — 25 carries, 244 yards, and 2 touchdowns in a 21-14 defeat to East Ridge. The game result did not disqualify the performance; SI's editors rewarded the output, and voters followed. That matters because it tells you this ballot is not just a won-game tracker.

Elijah Torola of Dassel-Cokato won with a receiving line: 5 catches, 117 yards, 2 touchdowns in a 42-28 win over Morris Area/Chokio-Alberta. Anthony Taylor of Litchfield won with the most dominant ground performance on record here — 26 carries, 258 yards, 5 touchdowns in a 56-35 win. Sam Summer of Chaska won with a similar shape: 26 carries, 204 yards, 3 touchdowns in a 26-15 win over New Prague.

What holds across all four: standout skill-position stat lines in one game, across four different class levels, with two winners from smaller MSHSL programs (Dassel-Cokato and Litchfield) beating out nominees from larger schools. The classification system that governs playoff brackets has no weight here. What matters is how well one school's community turns out for Sunday voting.

Sam Summer appeared as a nominee in the October 21 field before winning the October 29 poll — confirmation that SI can and does nominate the same player in back-to-back weeks when the performance warrants it.

A statewide field and what it means for campaign geography

Minnesota's six-class MSHSL structure produces nominee fields that span the full range of the state's football landscape in a single weekly list. A 1A school from the southwestern corner of the state sits on the same ballot as a 6A suburb of the Twin Cities. That cross-class format is not incidental — it is the design of the poll — and it shapes how a campaign has to think about turnout.

The large suburban programs around the Twin Cities — Eden Prairie, Wayzata, Maple Grove, Lakeville North, Lakeville South — carry the state's widest absolute fan bases. Maple Grove alone had nominees in at least three separate 2025 weeks. Those programs draw on current families, alumni, and local communities in the hundreds of thousands. The trade-off is reach: a large, loosely connected network takes time to activate, and Sunday-night windows close fast.

Programs like Dassel-Cokato, Litchfield, or Hermantown draw from smaller absolute populations but tighter social fabric. A cooperative-school community in central Minnesota can route a poll link through coaches, parents, and boosters in a single afternoon in ways that a suburban district spread across multiple municipalities cannot. The confirmed winner from Dassel-Cokato and Litchfield in 2025 are not upsets — they are exactly what the math predicts when a smaller community organizes completely and a larger one turns out at five percent.

For supporters running a campaign here, the statewide scope cuts both ways. A Duluth program can pull votes from the Iron Range and the Twin Cities at the same time; a program in Rochester competes in a market that includes both the Mayo Clinic workforce community and rural southeastern Minnesota. Understanding where your specific network is concentrated — and what reminder format reaches them on Sunday afternoon — matters more than the size of the school on paper. The national directory of fan-vote contests is at /usa/; Minnesota-specific contests are collected at /usa/minnesota/.