Minnesota Class 6A Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why Class 6A carries a different identity than the rest of Minnesota's ladder

Wayzata. Eden Prairie. Maple Grove. Lakeville South. Say those four names to anyone who follows Minnesota prep football and the words "Class 6A" barely need to follow. MSHSL's top enrollment tier is where the state's biggest athletic departments, deepest coaching staffs, and most-followed programs live, and SI Minnesota's Football Player of the Year ballot for that class reflects it: a field pulled almost entirely from the Twin Cities' outer-ring suburbs, not the small towns and growth corridors that define the classes underneath it.

That's a genuinely different community than Class 1A's Houston County bluff towns or Class 3A's exurban growth corridors. A 6A program isn't building a fan base from scratch or watching new subdivisions fill in around it. It's managing one that's already large, already organized, and often split across multiple sports competing for the same families' attention. A Wayzata or Eden Prairie fan base spends the same autumn Sundays following the Vikings — a level of competing attention no small Class 1A town's booster club has to plan around.

None of that changes the mechanics of the ballot itself. SI Minnesota runs Class 6A the same way it runs every other class: one article, one December window, the same class-by-class format the outlet also uses for Iowa's football Player of the Year. What changes is the shape of the audience clicking the link, not the sequence of steps required to reach it.

Where Minnesota's largest-enrollment programs actually cluster

Six classes, one obvious pattern: draw a 30-mile ring around Minneapolis-St. Paul and most of Class 6A's realistic field sits inside it. Enrollment is the only qualifier for the tier, and Minnesota's biggest school districts by raw student count are almost all outer-ring suburban ones. That's a different geography than Class 1A's scatter of bluff-country and prairie towns, or Class 3A's specific highway growth corridors.

The west metro cluster carries the most name recognition: Wayzata and Eden Prairie sit in Hennepin County not far apart, with Maple Grove a short drive north. South of the river, Lakeville North and Lakeville South split one fast-grown Dakota County city between two rosters, while Rosemount and Prior Lake round out that same corridor further out. Blaine and Andover anchor the north metro in Anoka County. Woodbury and East Ridge do the same job in Washington County to the east, close enough to share a zip code but large enough to field entirely separate teams. St. Michael-Albertville, out in Wright County, sits at the cluster's outer edge — proof that Minnesota's largest class isn't core-metro-only, just mostly.

That density changes what a campaign looks like before a single vote is cast. A 1A program might be the only game in its county. A 6A program is one of a dozen inside a 45-minute drive, all pulling from the same regional news coverage and the same pool of youth-sports parents juggling three kids' schedules on any given Friday.

What's nailed down for Class 6A, and what SI still doesn't publish

Start with what's actually confirmed, because it's a short list. The ballot is annual. It runs in December, after the postseason ends. It's isolated to Class 6A the same way each of Minnesota's other enrollment tiers gets its own standalone article, and it follows the identical class-by-class model SI Minnesota already runs for Classes 1A through 3A, a structure confirmed active through the 2025 season for those classes, with 6A built on the same annual cycle.

The gap that matters most: no aggregated results page exists for Class 6A any more than it does for the smaller classes. That's a little counterintuitive. A 6A program's season draws more regional press coverage than most smaller programs get anywhere else on the internet, but the SI ballot itself doesn't inherit that visibility. It's a standalone December post like every other class's, gone from the homepage within days and never folded into a searchable results table.

Practically, that leaves a metro program's supporters with the same problem a rural program's supporters face the following year: no results archive to search, just the live article, found by going to si.com/high-school/minnesota directly during the open window.

Three Minnesota SI football ballots, and why mixing them up costs a 6A program votes

Minnesota carries three overlapping SI football and sports fan votes depending on the time of year, and a 6A program's supporters mixing them up is the single most common way to waste a December push.

A 6A program's own players are the most likely nominees on that weekly, all-classes Football Player of the Week ballot too, purely on volume: bigger rosters produce more qualifying performances across a ten-week season. That weekly exposure can create a false sense that the December Class 6A award works the same way, with a fresh shot every week. It doesn't. By the time the Class 6A Player of the Year article goes live, the weekly ballot has already closed for the year. The annual award is a single, unrepeatable window.

The class isolation cuts both directions for a 6A nominee specifically. A 5A, 4A, or smaller-class standout never appears on the same Class 6A ballot, which sounds like an advantage until you register what it actually means: a 6A field draws only from the state's largest-enrollment programs, so a nominee isn't just clearing a high bar, it's clearing one set against a field selected entirely from schools built the same size. There's no small-school Cinderella slot on this particular ballot. That's the trade-off built into being MSHSL's top class.

Running a push where the booster club has a marketing budget

A Class 1A program's edge is a group chat that reaches nearly everyone who cares. A Class 6A program doesn't have that option. The supporter base is too large and too spread out for one text thread to cover, so the programs that move real numbers on this ballot tend to lean on something smaller schools usually don't have: organized athletic-department marketing.

Several of the state's largest programs run booster associations with communications coordinators, scheduled social content, and mailing lists built over years of season-ticket sales and youth-program sign-ups. That's a fundamentally different mobilization tool than a small town's church bulletin or word of mouth at the barber shop. It runs closer to a mid-size nonprofit's member outreach than a grassroots push: multiple channels firing on a coordinated schedule instead of one relationship-driven chain.

The trade-off is coordination cost. A tight Class 1A town can activate its full realistic voter pool inside a single afternoon because everyone already knows everyone. A 6A program has to actually run the campaign: decide who posts when, which alumni list gets the first email, whether the swim boosters and the football boosters share an audience worth cross-promoting to. Skipping that coordination is the most common way a big program with a bigger fan base ends up moving fewer incremental votes than a well-organized, much smaller one.

Same-day urgency still applies no matter the class size. A share posted within hours of the article going live catches supporters before the post disappears down a large athletic department's social feed, buried under the next day's schedule update. Programs that have already worked their booster lists, alumni chains, and district social accounts and still need reach before the window closes can look at sports fan-poll vote support, built for exactly this kind of hard-deadline ballot. The mechanics that apply broadly before Minnesota specifics take over are covered in the online contest voting guide and the legality primer. Minnesota's wider slate of fan-vote programs — including the Baseball Player of the Week ballot, the Hobey Baker Award fan vote, and civic programs like Minnesota's Best and the Brainerd Lakes Area's Best of the Best — sits at the Minnesota contest hub.