Montana High School Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Montana award people mix up with a different poll

Two separate Montana high school honors run under two separate organizers, and mixing them up wastes a campaign's best week. NBC Montana's stations run a weekly, in-season Athlete of the Week fan vote. This page is about something else: the annual, end-of-season Montana High School Player of the Year public vote inside Sports Illustrated's High School on SI network, hosted at si.com/high-school/montana. One crowns a standout every week during the season. The other names one athlete for the entire year, after every classification has already finished its schedule.

That distinction changes the whole shape of a campaign. A weekly poll gives a family roughly a week to mobilize. An annual vote compresses everything into whatever window High School on SI opens once the fall, winter, and spring MHSA seasons have all wrapped: a single ballot, once a year, with the entire state's talent pool sitting on it at the same time.

SI's national High School on SI operation runs this Athlete and Player of the Year cycle across dozens of states, Montana included, as one format applied state by state. A Montana-specific list of prior winners has never surfaced on a dedicated page, and neither has a repeating calendar date for when the ballot opens; both details exist only inside whatever post happens to be live on si.com/high-school/montana once the vote actually runs. Building a plan around a date that hasn't been set yet is the mistake worth avoiding here. For the broader picture of how Montana's fan-vote programs stack up against each other, the Montana contests hub tracks what's currently open.

What the annual ballot covers, and how MHSA's four classes sit on one list

Montana High School Association sanctions four classifications: AA, A, B, and C, running from the state's largest metro programs down to eight-man and six-man football schools where a graduating class can run under 30 students. The Player of the Year ballot doesn't split by class. One name, drawn from nominees across every classification and every sport MHSA sanctions, gets named the year's standout.

That single-ballot format is the entire premise of an annual honor like this one. A Class AA volleyball standout from Billings Senior and a Class C six-man quarterback from a county with a single stoplight can both land on the same year-end list. Enrollment doesn't set eligibility, and it doesn't set the outcome either.

That last row is worth sitting with for a second. High School on SI doesn't lock a fixed opening date the way a weekly poll does. The annual vote goes live once enough of the season's results are in to build a credible statewide nominee pool, then it stays open for whatever window that year's editorial team sets. So the plan can't be "wait until the usual week." There isn't one yet.

Why an all-class annual ballot favors different towns than a weekly one does

Montana covers roughly 147,000 square miles with four real population centers (Billings, Missoula, Bozeman, and Great Falls) and dozens of Class B and C towns where the whole adult population could fit inside one Class AA school's stadium. On a weekly poll, geography usually favors whichever metro happens to have a nominee that particular week. An annual ballot flips part of that logic: every classification's full season is already finished, so the field is a full year of standout performances from every corner of the state, not just whoever got nominated in a given seven-day stretch.

That changes the campaign math. A booster network in a small Class B town (Three Forks, say, or Chinook) has had an entire season to build local pride around one athlete's full body of work, not a single highlight. By the time the annual ballot opens, that network already knows exactly who it's voting for. A Class AA program in Billings or Missoula, drawing on a larger but more scattered alumni base, has to out-organize that pre-built local intensity with sheer numbers, not just size.

Montana's other statewide and regional fan-vote programs run on a related logic, even covering different subjects entirely. The Best of Whitefish readers' poll and the Best of the Flathead program both reward tight, well-organized small communities over larger, slower-moving ones. So do the region's weekly sports polls: the KBZK Bozeman Athlete of the Week vote and the KTVQ Billings Athlete of the Week poll both crown a winner from turnout alone, the same mechanic that decides the SI Player of the Year ballot, just stretched across a full year instead of a week.

Getting on the ballot, then running a vote with no published cap

High School on SI builds its Montana nominee pool from performances its editorial desk tracks across the season, plus coach, parent, and school submissions through the network's normal contact channels. There isn't one dedicated nomination email published specifically for the Montana Player of the Year cycle the way some weekly SBLive polls run. The practical move is watching si.com/high-school/montana for the nomination call once the annual cycle is announced, then responding through whatever channel that specific post lists.

Once the ballot goes live, the absence of a published per-device cap changes the strategy compared with a capped weekly poll. Where a six-hour reset rewards a supporter returning again and again, a format without a stated cap rewards reach instead: the number of distinct people who click through and vote, more than how many times any one device revisits the page. Confirm the actual rule on the live poll page before assuming either way; SI's terms can shift by cycle and by state.

The campaigns that do well here start before the vote even opens. A coach or booster club with a season-long highlight reel and a one-paragraph nomination case ready to go can forward it the moment the ballot posts, instead of writing it from scratch inside a shrinking window. Sharing the direct si.com link (not a screenshot, not just the athlete's name) into team group chats, school alumni pages, and county Facebook groups pulls in more of the click-through an uncapped format rewards.

For a campaign that has already exhausted organic reach and still needs more turnout before an unannounced close date, structured fan-poll vote support exists for exactly this open-ballot format. The broader mechanics of running any online vote (pacing, timing, avoiding detection triggers) are covered in the online contest voting guide.

What the credential is actually worth, and what stays unconfirmed

Winning produces a named feature on Sports Illustrated's high school sports platform, a national outlet rather than a regional one. For an athlete at a Class B or C program without regular statewide media coverage, that's a meaningfully different credential than a weekly local poll win. It's the kind of third-party mention that can surface in a college recruiting search alongside game film and stats.

What isn't confirmed anywhere in SI's public materials is a cash prize, a scholarship, or a physical trophy tied to the honor. Treat the recognition itself as the reward until a specific cycle's rules say otherwise. There's also no public, cross-year database of past Montana winners: each year's result lives inside that year's dated post on si.com/high-school/montana, the same limitation that applies to most state-level fan-vote programs run at this scale.

Families often ask next whether this even counts as a "real" award, given a turnout count decides it rather than a judged panel. It does, in the sense that matters most here: the vote total is the only criterion, and no committee second-guesses it afterward. The legal mechanics of supporting a vote in an open contest like this one lay out where that line actually sits before a family commits real time to a big push. A campaign built on real people voting, paced to whatever limit the live page happens to state that cycle, is the only kind that survives contact with SI's review process.