New York Section 1 High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Wednesday at 3 p.m. — the one thing most voters don't know

Arrive at the lohud Section 1 football Player of the Week poll thinking you have until Sunday and you have already lost the week. The ballot closes Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. — a deadline that catches supporters off-guard every season because every other regional poll in New York runs through the weekend. That schedule is not a quirk; it is the structural fact that determines when a campaign has to move.

The article typically posts Monday or Tuesday after editors compile the weekend's results. That leaves, at most, two days of open voting before the Wednesday afternoon cutoff. A share link posted Wednesday morning is the last realistic wave, and anything that goes out after noon has almost no time to convert. In practice the decisive hours are Tuesday evening and Wednesday before noon — a window that rewards whoever reaches their community first, not who has the largest network in the abstract.

The November 17, 2025 ballot illustrates what that compressed window produces. Six nominees represented programs from Tuckahoe to Iona Prep to Rye, and every one of their supporters had to organize and vote within roughly 48 hours of the article going live. Carson Miller of Rye — 347 passing yards, 2 touchdowns, plus 87 rushing yards and 3 more — was the statistical standout that week. Whether his Garnets supporters moved faster in that narrow window than Crew Davis's Iona Prep constituency, or Brayden Richardson's Sleepy Hollow backers, came down entirely to who organized first.

What the 2025 winner list reveals about this poll

Nine different programs produced a Section 1 Player of the Week winner in fall 2025: Mahopac, Eastchester, Hackley, Pelham (twice), Peekskill, Valhalla, Yorktown, and Mamaroneck. Read that list carefully — it runs from a small private school (Hackley) to mid-size publics in northern Westchester to Pelham winning two weeks. No single program won back-to-back awards in the confirmed 2025 record.

That spread is not accidental. The geographic and institutional range of Section 1 — Rockland County programs like North Rockland, inner-Westchester schools like Yonkers Force and New Rochelle, northern suburbs like Mahopac and Yorktown, and CHSFL schools like Iona Prep — means the ballot rarely consolidates around one dominant fanbase. A week when North Rockland has a nominee (Tyler Prisco ran for 224 yards and 2 TDs in October 2025) sits next to a week when Tuckahoe or Valhalla wins on a smaller school's tighter network. The poll's diversity of winners reflects its geography.

It also means the field in any given week is genuinely contested. The October 2025 ballot had eleven nominees — a number large enough that a program mobilizing even three hundred supporters could clear a plurality if the rest of the field split evenly. Concentration of effort, not volume of followers, is what the 2025 winner list consistently confirms.

Section 1's community networks — who moves fast, and why

Westchester and Rockland counties hold a specific kind of prep football culture: densely packed suburban programs separated by a few miles, rivalries that predate most current coaches, and alumni who stayed local. That topology shapes how votes move in a 48-hour window.

Iona Prep draws from an alumni network of Catholic school graduates across the Bronx, Westchester, and lower Fairfield County — a constituency that reaches past the immediate school community and responds to group-chat pushes faster than a public school of similar enrollment. Crew Davis's November 2025 nomination, with 162 rushing yards plus 75 receiving, gave that network something concrete to rally around. Cardinal Hayes, competing in the same CHSFL corridor, works similarly.

The northern Section 1 publics — Mahopac, Yorktown, North Rockland — carry large athletic boosters and active parent associations that have already built the communication infrastructure for sports campaigns. Matt Bentivenga winning for Mahopac and Tyler Caricati winning for Yorktown in 2025 both reflect programs with organized, responsive fan structures.

Smaller programs like Tuckahoe or Pelham (which won twice) work differently: the school is small enough that the varsity player's circle of teammates, friends, and family represents a meaningful share of the voting base. When Frankie Reese won for Pelham and Tristan Paganuzzi won for Pelham again in the same season, it was the same community activating twice — a tight network that needed minimal coordination to produce a result.

For any of these programs, the practical lesson is the same: the Tuesday evening push — the team group chat, the booster page post, the player's own accounts — is the most important single action. If that goes out after Wednesday morning, it is too late. If you need a broader reach before Wednesday closes, the how-to guide covers how structured vote-support campaigns work for weekly regional polls. More New York contests are listed at /usa/new-york/, and the national directory is at /usa/.