New York High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Eleven sections, one ballot: why New York's poll structure is unlike any other

New York is the only state in the country where a high school football player from Delaware County competes on the same fan-vote ballot as a Long Island Catholic-school sophomore, a Buffalo-area running back, and a Westchester quarterback — all in the same week. That is not a design accident. It is what makes the New York SI statewide poll structurally different from every regional football ballot in the state, including the Section 1 Lohud poll that covers only Westchester and Rockland.

New York's eleven NYSPHSAA sections span the Adirondacks to the New York City border, from the Southern Tier farming communities where Waverly and Delaware Academy play to the densely Catholic-school-networked suburbs of Long Island. The CHSFL — the Catholic High School Football League — operates outside the NYSPHSAA structure entirely, which is why St. Anthony's, Chaminade, Iona Prep, and Monsignor Farrell can all appear on a statewide SI ballot in the same week without competing against each other in sectionals.

The October 16, 2024 ballot had ten nominees. Six came from CHSFL programs or Long Island Catholic schools. Four came from upstate or suburban public programs. Ian Johnson of Delaware Academy in the October 23 ballot is a useful test case — Delaware Academy is a Class D school in a county of 47,000 people, and he posted 283 rushing yards in a single game and landed on the same ten-name list as Gary Merrill of St. Anthony's, one of the most talent-rich programs in the Northeast. The ballot does not filter by enrollment tier, section rank, or school affiliation. The result is the most geographically and institutionally heterogeneous prep football poll in the state.

What the repeat nominees reveal about campaign momentum

Three players appeared on multiple 2024 New York ballots within the same October run: Gary Merrill of St. Anthony's, Caelan Porter of Gloversville, and Julian Guzman of Iona Prep. That pattern is worth examining before any campaign strategy.

Merrill's two nominations are the most striking. He posted 429 all-purpose yards and 6 touchdowns on October 16, then 197 rushing yards and 3 touchdowns on October 23. His presence on consecutive ballots means that St. Anthony's supporters — a Long Island Catholic-school network that extends across Nassau County and into the broader CHSFL alumni community — were being asked to vote for him two weeks in a row. A school with active parent and booster group chats does not have to rebuild its voting audience from scratch when the same player returns to the ballot.

Porter's arc from Gloversville is a different lesson. Gloversville is in Fulton County, a former glove-manufacturing city of under 15,000 people in Section II. He was a 12-of-15, 226-yard, 5-touchdown quarterback on October 16, then 12-of-15, 301-yard, 4-touchdown the following week. In a pool dominated by Long Island and CHSFL schools, Gloversville's supporters were voting against programs with far larger absolute alumni bases. That they earned a second nomination confirms SI's editors were watching — it does not confirm they won, because week-by-week vote totals for this poll are not published.

The practical takeaway: on a statewide twelve-name ballot with a single Sunday window, name recognition from prior weeks' coverage is an asset. Voters who scanned a ballot two weeks ago and remember a name vote faster. A player who has been on two ballots has already been introduced to the statewide audience once.

The Sunday window and how statewide campaigns run differently

The New York SI poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. — which makes the active voting window roughly twelve to sixteen hours on a single day. Compare that to the Dallas / North Texas regional poll, which closes Monday at 11:59 p.m. and gives campaigns a full additional day. In New York, everything happens Sunday.

The compressed timeline changes how a statewide campaign has to be structured. A Section 1 nominee on the Lohud ballot has until Wednesday afternoon — time to run a Sunday post, a Monday reminder through the school's social accounts, and a Tuesday push through booster networks. The SI poll gives none of that. The ballot article goes up Sunday morning, the close is Sunday night, and the winner is announced with the following week's ballot. Campaigns that do not have their mobilization plan ready before the ballot goes live are already behind. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence that applies to this kind of recurring Sunday-close ballot.

For upstate programs like Gloversville or schools in Section IV, the statewide reach of the ballot is the only structural advantage over the Long Island schools with larger absolute alumni bases. An Iroquois supporter in Buffalo or a Gloversville alumnus now living in Albany can vote just as easily as someone in Massapequa — but only if they know the ballot exists and when it closes.

Running a New York campaign across twelve sections

The statewide field is both the opportunity and the problem. In the October 23, 2024 ballot, the twelve nominees came from Long Island Catholic schools, Western New York, the Southern Tier, Section I, and Section II. Any campaign that reaches only its own geographic pocket — only Nassau County families, or only Fulton County locals — is working at a structural disadvantage against the combination of nominees from everywhere else.

CHSFL programs have one specific advantage: alumni networks that span Long Island and the New York City metro and are maintained through church and parish connections rather than purely through geographic proximity. A Chaminade or St. Anthony's nominee activates a different kind of network than a public-school nominee in Section V. Those networks stay active across graduation years in ways that make a Sunday push more likely to reach former students now living in different states.

For upstate programs, the calculus is different. The community is smaller and more centralized, which means a coordinated Sunday push through a single school group chat, a booster Facebook page, and the local paper's Facebook post can reach a high percentage of the potential voter pool in a short window. The ceiling is lower, but the efficiency is higher. Because the ballot is settled entirely by turnout — no editorial weight, no tiebreaker — the question is always which nominee's supporters show up in the Sunday window, not which community is theoretically larger. Structured vote-support campaigns exist for exactly this kind of one-day statewide poll, and they are most useful when the organic mobilization has a known ceiling. More New York contests are listed at /usa/new-york/, and the national directory is at /usa/.