WPXI Skylights Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one mix-up that costs Skylights votes

WPXI runs two fan votes on the same sports hub every fall, and they get confused constantly. Skylights Player of the Week picks a standout performance from five weekly nominees. A second, separately branded ballot, the Fan Game of the Week, picks which WPIAL game the station sends a crew to broadcast. Different sponsors (RE/MAX Select Realty backs Skylights; Eat'n Park and Thermo Twin Windows back the game vote), different question, different link. Share the wrong URL in a group chat and every vote lands on the broadcast poll instead.

So the first job for anyone campaigning is boring but critical: confirm the ballot at wpxi.com/sports/skylights actually shows five player nominees, not a matchup between two schools. That single check prevents the most common wasted-share mistake on this page. For how weekly fan-vote mechanics generally work, the guide to winning online voting contests covers the fundamentals; this page covers what's specific to WPXI. Other Pennsylvania fan votes are collected at the Pennsylvania hub, alongside the rest of the state-by-state directory.

What WPXI does and doesn't publish about the ballot

Here's the gap. WPXI names its five weekly nominees and its sponsor. It does not publish vote counts, margins, or a running tally of past winners anywhere on its Skylights hub. No public archive, no leaderboard. That's a real limit on what this page, or anyone, can tell you about how close a given week's race actually is.

What is confirmed: nominees come from WPXI's own Skylights sports desk, the same reporting team that has covered Friday-night WPIAL football for years, drawing five performances from that week's games across Allegheny, Westmoreland, Washington, and Beaver counties. Nobody submits a name for consideration. The desk picks based on what its reporters saw on the field. That's closer to an editorial call than an open-submission fan contest, which matters if you're wondering why a strong stat line didn't make the cut some week, it isn't purely a numbers filter.

How the WPIAL's four-county structure changes the math

WPXI doesn't run a statewide ballot. It draws strictly from the WPIAL, District 7 in the PIAA system, which covers Allegheny, Westmoreland, Washington, and Beaver counties. That's the entire Pittsburgh media market, and it's one of the most talent-dense single districts in the country. A nominee from a big Allegheny County program shares a ballot with someone from a Beaver County conference the same week. Enrollment size doesn't sort the field first; the desk's editorial pick does.

Practically: a supporter checking a given week's five names can look up which county and conference each nominee represents (WPIAL conference assignments are public) and get a rough read on how crowded the field is. Four nominees from Allegheny County alone in one week is a different contest than four spread across all four counties. Nobody publishes this analysis for you; it takes five minutes of comparing school names against WPIAL conference lists. Fans backing a nominee in a crowded field sometimes turn to fan poll vote support once organic outreach has run its course.

What steady campaigning actually looks like here

No account, no login, free vote, and no published per-person cap beyond whatever the live ballot states that week. That's a low-friction setup, which also means it rewards whoever keeps asking, not just whoever posts once. The ballot resets weekly, so a Tuesday push and a Saturday push aren't the same audience; people who missed the first reminder often catch the second.

Name the school and the county when you ask someone to vote. "Vote for [player] from [school], Beaver County" tells a stranger enough to act in five seconds; "vote for our guy" does not. And because the field draws from four separate counties rather than one shared conference, cross-posting into groups outside the nominee's immediate school (alumni pages, county-wide sports forums) reaches people who'd otherwise never see the ballot. Related programs worth checking for comparison: the Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week and the Pennsylvania High School Athlete of the Week, both statewide rather than WPIAL-only. For general campaign mechanics beyond this one ballot, see getting votes on social media and getting people to vote for you. Anyone weighing whether outside vote support fits a program like this should start with how buying votes online works and the honesty check at is buying votes safe.