North Dakota High School Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

One si.com page, two completely different ballots

Bookmark si.com/high-school/north-dakota and you'll hit a different vote almost every time you visit. Most weeks during the season it's the Athlete of the Week poll, refreshed on a rolling basis. Once a year, that gives way to something else entirely: the Player of the Year ballot, a single up-or-down statewide vote that runs once and closes.

Two Bismarck seniors could both win Athlete of the Week in the same October and then never see each other's name again on the Player of the Year ballot months later. The link is the organizer, not the roster.

Why the annual ballot changes the math

A weekly poll forgives a slow start; you get another shot in seven days. The annual ballot doesn't. Miss the window and there's no second chance until next year.

That compression flips the strategy. Instead of one good week, a nominee's supporters get one extended stretch, sometimes weeks, to build and hold attention on a single name. Family in Fargo, alumni in Fergus Falls, a grandmother in Minneapolis who still gets the hometown paper: all of it counts, and all of it has to land inside the same open window rather than being spread across a season.

Free to vote. No si.com account. No email required. Fan count alone decides it once the ballot goes live, and the editorial team's job ends the moment nominees are set. See how bought-vote legality is generally assessed for the broader framework these organizer rules sit inside.

Who's actually on the ballot

Nominees are pulled from NDHSAA member schools, and the pool spans the state's full classification ladder rather than favoring the largest programs.

Bismarck alone fields three Class AAA programs inside one city; West Fargo runs two more under a single district. That's five big-school ballots crowded into two ZIP codes before you even reach Fargo proper. Dickinson and Williston, out in the Bakken, and Jamestown to the east carry the state's Class AA presence: smaller enrollment, but a nominee from one of those towns is not an underdog by default. NDHSAA's classification structure puts them on the exact same ballot as a Fargo or Bismarck nominee, with no weighting for school size.

How the vote actually works

The ballot sits inside the article at si.com/high-school/north-dakota. No Sports Illustrated subscription, no app, nothing beyond a browser tab. Click a name in the embedded widget, submit, done. General mechanics of how online contest voting works are covered in our contest voting guide; what follows is specific to this ballot.

Totals update live while the window is open. And because si.com doesn't geofence, a cousin in Minneapolis or an aunt in Sioux Falls votes exactly the same as someone sitting in Bismarck. That out-of-state reach matters more here than in most state polls: North Dakota's population is small enough that alumni networks in neighboring Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana can meaningfully move a close ballot.

No tiebreaker beyond raw count. Scripts and macros are barred under the organizer's platform rules; SBLive's system flags the traffic pattern, not the vote itself.

Getting real votes to a nominee, ND-style

Sustained beats sudden here. A single-night push works for a weekly poll with low stakes and another round next Monday; it does nothing for a ballot that only opens once a year and rewards whoever keeps showing up.

Bismarck's three-school cluster and West Fargo's two-school district each risk splitting their own town's vote if more than one local nominee lands on the ballot in the same cycle. Three Bismarck schools competing for the same Bismarck Facebook groups thins everyone's total. A Class AA nominee out of Jamestown or Dickinson faces the opposite problem: no in-town rival, a smaller population, but often a sharper share of that population actually turning up to vote because there's only one name from home on the ballot.

What tends to move the needle: naming the ballot explicitly (Player of the Year, not Athlete of the Week) every time it's shared, so followers don't click the wrong si.com poll. Reaching alumni chapters outside the state rather than assuming the vote lives or dies locally. And treating the extended window as a reason to space out reminders, not blast once and stop. The general playbook for sustained vote drives covers the reminder cadence in more depth.

Some campaigns supplement organic reach with a paid real-voter service once family, school, and alumni channels are tapped out. Our fan poll votes service delivers paced, human-clicked votes rather than scripted traffic, useful for exactly the out-of-state-reach gap described above, not as a replacement for it.

What counts as a real vote here, and what doesn't

High School on SI's rules target manipulation, not enthusiasm. The organizer draws one clear line.

• Automated scripts, macros, bots: software submitting votes without a person clicking each one. SBLive's platform detects the traffic signature; this is what the rules prohibit.
• Human outreach at scale: real people clicking the button themselves, reached by text, email, a Facebook group, or a paid promotion network. Each click is manual. Structurally it's no different from a booster club forwarding an email to more families.

Whether paid human outreach fits the spirit of a given year's terms is a call each nominee's camp makes after reading the live ballot page, since the organizer's language can shift cycle to cycle. There's no cash prize or state sweepstakes framework attached to this one; the stakes are reputational, tied to what a nationally-read SI credential is worth on a résumé or recruiting profile.

For the rest of North Dakota's fan-vote programs, see the North Dakota contest hub; for the full state-by-state index, the USA guide covers every ballot we track.