New Hampshire SI Athlete of the Week; Fall Season: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why the fall ballot reads differently than the year-round NH poll

Football decides most weeks here. That's the short version. High School on SI runs the same New Hampshire fan-vote engine all year, but the fall edition; the one confirmed live from September through November 2025; pulls its nominees from a narrower band of sports: football, soccer, cross country, volleyball, and field hockey. A basketball or hockey standout simply isn't eligible for this particular window. That narrowing changes who shows up on the ballot week to week, and it changes which New Hampshire communities have the most reason to check si.com/high-school/new-hampshire on a given Wednesday.

Friday-night football is the cultural backbone of NHIAA fall sports, and the Granite State's Division I corridor; Manchester, Nashua, Londonderry, Bedford, Concord; supplies a heavy share of nominees during any given October stretch. But cross country and soccer pull from a wider, quieter set of towns; a program with a modest football roster can still put a nominee up in a sport where the whole state pays closer attention in the fall months. For readers weighing whether a fan-vote push is worth the effort, the guide to how online contest voting works lays out the general mechanics before the New Hampshire specifics below.

None of that changes the basic shape of the poll. It changes the cast.

What's confirmed about the Sept–Nov 2025 fall window

Voting has run without a break since early September 2025, each weekly ballot opening mid-week and closing the following Sunday, and that rhythm held all the way through the confirmed window into November. No searchable archive of prior fall winners exists for this specific seasonal edition; the reliable part is the weekly pattern itself, not a lookup table of past results.

Three days. That's roughly the gap between a mid-week ballot going live and the Sunday close, though the exact publish day shifts around each week's game schedule. Anyone planning a push for a nominee should treat the window as short by default and check the live article early rather than assume a full seven days of runway.

The Division I corridor's built-in crowd on a fall ballot

Pinkerton Academy sits at one end of the spectrum; a single academy serving six surrounding towns, which means its fall nominees start with a voter pool that spans multiple municipalities rather than one. Manchester Central and the two Nashua schools sit inside the state's densest population centers, where a fall football or soccer nominee can reach thousands of households through nothing more than a school athletic department post.

Where a smaller school's tighter network can still keep pace

Smaller-footprint programs work differently. Bishop Guertin draws students from across southern New Hampshire rather than one town, giving it an alumni base that doesn't map neatly to Nashua's city limits. Winnacunnet and Exeter, on the Seacoast, pull from beach communities where the town identity runs stronger than the school's raw enrollment number would suggest; a cross country or soccer nominee from either school taps a network that's small in absolute size but tight and fast-moving. Goffstown, a Division III program, competes on the same ballot as Division I schools ten times its size in some fall weeks; the fan-vote format doesn't apply a division handicap.

For the broader New Hampshire fan-vote landscape beyond this one fall window, the New Hampshire contest hub lists the other SBLive and SI programs running across the state, including the year-round New Hampshire High School Football Player of the Week poll and the baseball edition that picks up once fall closes out.

Casting a vote and getting a fall nominee in front of people

The widget itself asks nothing of you. Open the current week's article at si.com/high-school/new-hampshire, find the embedded poll, click a nominee, done. No email field, no account creation, no app. That simplicity is also the whole reason reach matters more than repetition; since no registration step exists, there's no login to make repeat voting harder to track, so the platform's actual defense against abuse sits at the traffic-pattern level, not the account level.

What moves a fall nominee's total isn't a single big push on day one. It's the direct article link landing in the places where fall-sport supporters already gather; a team's group chat, a booster club's email list, a town Facebook group that already talks football or soccer every August through November. Sharing the athlete's name alone does less than sharing the actual poll URL, because the URL is the only thing that gets someone from "I heard about this" to an actual click inside the widget.

Because the fall window runs on a fixed Sunday close rather than an open-ended calendar, the final 24 to 48 hours before that close is typically when campaigns that were behind manage to catch up; supporters who saw the link earlier in the week but hadn't acted yet respond better to a reminder with an actual deadline attached. Some campaigns bring in outside help once the organic network has been tapped out; paid vote-support services built for fan polls exist for exactly that scenario, and the ones worth using spread votes out over the window instead of dumping them all at once. The legal overview of vote-buying covers how that practice generally gets treated, useful background before signing up for anything.