New Hampshire High School Girls Soccer & Volleyball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters don't know before the deadline passes

Thursday at 7 a.m. Most people have never voted in a fan poll that closes before the work week is half over. Every comparable state POTW — the SI.com New Hampshire Football poll, nearly every SBLive football ballot across New England — closes Sunday night or Monday. This one closes Thursday morning. By the time a family realizes the ballot is up, there may be less than 48 hours left.

That is the central fact about this poll. Everything else follows from it. The weekend mobilization playbook that works for football fan votes does not apply here. There is no Friday-night reminder, no Saturday family-shares-the-link moment, no Sunday-night final push. The decisive days are Tuesday and Wednesday. A campaign that starts when the ballot posts — which is typically Monday or early Tuesday — and closes out Wednesday night is running a full campaign. One that starts Thursday morning is already late.

It's also worth naming the combined structure plainly: a goalkeeper from a soccer powerhouse and a setter from a volleyball program can be nominees on the same list in the same week. That is not standard. Most state POTWs are sport-specific. NHSportsPage runs one fall ballot that covers both. So the field a soccer voter is looking at may include a volleyball player who drew strong backing from her school — and vice versa. Sport loyalty doesn't map cleanly onto voter behavior here the way it does in a single-sport poll.

What the confirmed poll structure tells us about campaign scale

No individual nominee names are publicly retrievable for this poll — the site blocks external data fetches, and NHSportsPage does not publish cumulative results or raw totals. That is an honest gap in the record. What is confirmed: five nominees per week on average (matching the football poll cadence on the same platform), a single combined ballot across two sports, and a Thursday morning close.

The football POTW on the same NHSportsPage platform had Sam Levine of Nashua South as one confirmed winner, which gives a benchmark school size. Nashua South is one of the larger programs in New Hampshire — a DI-caliber school in the state's most populous city. That result doesn't tell us that large schools always win; it tells us that turnout from a large urban program can clear a five-person field. A smaller school with a tighter-knit community voting together through Wednesday can do the same thing, and the five-person field keeps the vote concentration requirement lower than it would be in a ten-person field.

Because totals are never published, a win here is binary: the name is announced on NHSportsPage's social channels, and no margin is on record. That is a structural quirk worth knowing — the prize and the recognition are real, but the vote count behind them stays private.

For a broader look at the NHIAA fall season structure and New Hampshire prep sports context, see /usa/new-hampshire/; the national directory of fan-vote contests lives at /usa/.

Running a Wednesday-night campaign in a small state

New Hampshire is one of the smallest states in New England by population. That is an advantage, not a constraint, for a well-run fan-vote campaign. The statewide high school sports community is genuinely connected — coaches know coaches across divisions, NHIAA events draw families from Nashua to Colebrook, and local sports coverage in a small state reaches more of the community than it would in a state ten times the size. A poll link that travels through the right channels here reaches a meaningful share of the people who actually know the nominee.

The practical shape of a Thursday-close campaign: the ballot goes up Monday or Tuesday. That day, the player's immediate circle — teammates, close family — sees it first. Tuesday into Wednesday is the window for the wider circle: the school's sports social accounts, the booster group chat, the alumni thread from last year's team. Wednesday night is the final push, not a cleanup round. There is no more time after 7 a.m. Thursday.

The combined soccer-and-volleyball structure matters for strategy too. A school with both sports competitive in the same week could have one nominee representing both programs' fan energy — or it could have fans split across two nominees from different sports at the same school, if both land on the ballot. Knowing which situation you're in shapes how the campaign message is framed. Because the ballot has only around five names on it, a school whose community votes together — rather than splitting between a soccer player and a volleyball player from the same town — is better positioned.

For campaigns where organic reach isn't enough to move the needle before Wednesday night, vote-support services exist for fan polls of this type — the Thursday close means there's no room for a slow start and a late correction. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence that applies to recurring polls like this one.