New Mexico High School Football Star of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing you need to know before you mobilize

The Saturday 5 p.m. MT close is the entire story of this poll. Every other weekly high school football fan vote in the country runs through Sunday or Monday; the Albuquerque Journal shuts its ballot while Friday night's dust is still settling. That is not a minor scheduling detail — it is the structural fact that changes everything about how a campaign here works.

Consider what that means in practice. By the time most programs have organized a group text, drafted a social post, and reminded the extended family, a Sunday-close poll still has 36 hours. This one has twelve, maybe eighteen. A coach who sends the link on Saturday morning expecting to push through the afternoon is already in the final hour. The mobilization window is Friday night — right after the game, when the crowd is still in the parking lot.

No confirmed winner names are publicly archived in a persistent online format. The declared winners appear in Sunday's print edition of the Albuquerque Journal; the season recap article that was listed online returned 404 at time of research. What IS confirmed — from the actual weekly ballot articles that remained accessible — are the nominees. That is what this page works from.

What the 2025 nominees reveal about the ballot's real scope

The Journal nominates statewide, and the 2025 nominee lists make that concrete. Week 1 opened with seven players: Jahari Morehead from Eldorado (9 catches, 296 receiving yards), Isaiah Carpenter from St. Pius (397 pass yards, 5 touchdowns), Bryce Parra from Artesia (196 rush yards and a trick-play touchdown pass), Michael Storms III from Valencia (240 rush yards, 4 touchdowns), Jay Lee from Legacy Academy (three punt-return touchdowns plus a receiving score), Manual Chavarria from Bloomfield (5 touchdown passes to 5 different receivers), and Jordan Hatch from Cleveland (282 pass yards, 3 touchdowns). Three NMAA classifications on one ballot, metro ABQ to rural southeast.

By Week 8, the field had deepened. Jhett Kinghorn of La Cueva had a blocked-punt TD recovery, a 42-yard interception return for a score, a second interception, and a fumble recovery — all in the same game. Alberto Landeros of Albuquerque High ran 286 yards on 20 carries with 3 touchdowns against West Mesa. Junior Medrano of Hobbs threw for 154 yards and 4 touchdowns, then rushed for 146 more and a fifth. The Journal will nominate defense — Kinghorn's Week 8 nod confirms it.

And then there is Elijah Melancon of Eunice. He appeared on the Week 3 ballot (16 completions, 426 yards, 6 touchdowns in a 50-20 win over NMMI) and again on Week 11 (25 of 28, 366 yards, 7 touchdowns, surpassing 10,000 career passing yards). A Class 2A school in a small southeast New Mexico city, nominated twice in a season dominated by Albuquerque metro 6A names. Manual Chavarria of Bloomfield did the same — Week 1 and Week 3 both.

The ballot is not a 6A metro trophy. It rewards performance across the entire state. What determines the result is not enrollment — it's how many people a school's community reaches before Saturday afternoon.

The two communities that define this poll: ABQ metro and the southeast corridor

New Mexico high school football has two distinct power structures, and both show up regularly on this ballot.

The Albuquerque metro concentrates nine 6A programs within driving distance of each other: Cleveland, La Cueva, Rio Rancho, Cibola, Volcano Vista, Eldorado, Sandia, West Mesa, Albuquerque High. Cleveland won the 6A state championship in 2024 — their fourth title in five years. La Cueva is a perennial bracket presence. These programs carry the largest raw fan bases in the state. They also carry the structural challenges of a wide, loosely connected audience. A poll link shared on a metro school's social account reaches more people in absolute terms; it converts to votes at a lower rate per person than a tightly networked small-city program does.

The southeast corridor runs through Hobbs, Artesia, Eunice, Lovington, and Carlsbad — the oil-patch towns that have produced state championships across multiple classes for decades. Artesia is among the most consistently successful programs in New Mexico history. Eunice's Melancon passed for 10,000 career yards. Texico won the 2A title in 2024 and put a sophomore on the Week 11 ballot. These communities are smaller in population but more concentrated. The booster network in a small town where the Friday game is the social event of the week activates differently than a metro district where football is one of twenty things competing for attention.

Neither profile dominates automatically. The poll record is clear that both reach the ballot regularly. What actually decides a given week is which community treats Friday night as the starting gun.

Running a campaign in a twelve-hour window

Getting on the ballot starts with James Yodice. He is the Journal contact for nominations — [email protected], or @JamesDYodice on X. A message that arrives Saturday or Sunday with the player's name, school, position, stat line, and opponent gives the staff what they need before the next week's field is set. A great performance that nobody flags can be missed.

Once the ballot is live, the compressed Saturday window demands a specific sequence. Post the poll link on the school's accounts Friday night, immediately after the game — that is when turnout, adrenaline, and attention are all in the same place at once. Anyone who does this Saturday morning is already hours into a window that closes at 5 p.m.

The individual player's own network matters more in a local paper poll than in a regional SI ballot. The Albuquerque Journal readership is concentrated in the state — the player's extended family, their former youth coaches, the church group that followed the program for years. Those are the people who already read the paper and already know the name on the ballot. They need the link, not a sales pitch.

For anyone who wants to extend that reach beyond organic networks, vote support services sized for weekly reader polls can be deployed before the Saturday close. The state directory at /usa/new-mexico/ lists other New Mexico prep contests, and the full national guide is at /usa/.