Rhode Island High School Football Player of the Week (WPRI Blitz 12): How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters miss when they arrive here from an SI poll

Here is the gap that catches most people off guard. The SI Rhode Island Athlete of the Week — the other weekly RI fan vote — is an uncapped ballot: no account, no limit per device, unlimited repeat votes. WPRI's Blitz 12 ballot is not. The station's own language is clear: voters "can vote only once" based on their IP address and web browser. One connection, one vote.

That changes every calculation. A campaign that works by putting a link in front of a few dedicated supporters and asking them to vote repeatedly all week will flatline here. The votes that count come from distinct people, each on their own connection. So the real contest on the Blitz 12 ballot is reach — how many members of your school's community you can actually get to the wpri.com page before Wednesday at 7:00 p.m.

The upside is that it also levels the field. La Salle Academy's fan base is large in absolute terms. So is Bishop Hendricken's. But Ponaganset High School in North Scituate — a Division III program — won in October 2024 anyway. A tight community that turns out at a high rate can beat a bigger school that turns out at a low one. The cap is what makes that math possible.

What the confirmed winners tell us about the ballot's real dynamics

Read the confirmed winners as a set, not just as individual names.

Jadiel Santiago of Central High School won with 5 touchdowns and 260 total yards against Toll Gate in October 2024. Antonio Bearden of La Salle Academy won with 3 touchdowns in a 21-20 defeat of Bishop Hendricken — the closest, highest-stakes game in recent RI Catholic football, decided by a single point. Cam Ruggieri of Portsmouth kicked the game-winning field goal against Bishop Hendricken in 2025 and won anyway, even though kickers almost never lead fan-vote ballots.

What connects those three? The performances were tied to games that mattered to specific communities. La Salle beating Hendricken by one is the kind of result that gets forwarded in group chats for days. A game-winning kick is a singular, shareable moment — easy to explain in a text or a post. Santiago's 5-touchdown night was a breakout that Central's community could rally around.

The pattern is not "the biggest stat wins." It is "the performance that gives a community something to talk about tends to win." The WPRI broadcasts create the opening; the school's own social network does the rest.

And because the field is 3 nominees — not 6 or 8 like some state polls — a split is less likely. Two-thirds of a week's nominees lose. The question is whether your school's network shows up faster and more completely than the other two.

The Rhode Island football community and the Catholic school dynamic

Rhode Island high school football runs through a concentrated geography. The state is the smallest in the country by area, and its best programs sit within a commutable distance of one another. That compactness means alumni networks are not scattered across a metro the way they would be in a Texas or Ohio market — an La Salle or Bishop Hendricken alum in Providence is probably twenty minutes from the school they graduated from.

The Catholic school rivalry is central to this poll. La Salle Academy and Bishop Hendricken are the two biggest names in RIIL Division I football. Hendricken won three consecutive Division I championships from 2022 through 2024. La Salle's 21-20 win over Hendricken in October 2025 — the game that produced Antonio Bearden's winning POTW performance — was exactly the kind of result that galvanizes La Salle's alumni. So was Cam Ruggieri's game- winning kick for Portsmouth against Hendricken.

Classical High School ran an undefeated regular season in 2024. Central High School has produced two confirmed POTW winners from different seasons. None of those are Catholic schools — they are Providence public programs with strong community identities of their own. The ballot does not belong to the Catholic schools; it reflects whichever community mobilizes that specific week.

For a supporter running a campaign here, the single most effective move is identifying the specific group chat, parent booster thread, or alumni Facebook group where your school's voters actually coordinate — and getting the link into that space on Monday, Tuesday, and once more Wednesday morning. Rhode Island is small enough that one well-placed message in the right group can reach most of a school's active supporters in a few hours.

For more Rhode Island high school sports fan votes, see the Rhode Island fan-vote directory. The national high school contest directory is at /usa/. The how-to guide walks through the weekly campaign cadence that applies across capped and uncapped fan polls. If you are comparing vote-support options for a capped one-per-IP ballot, the vote support overview and the sports fan-poll page explain how distributed-IP approaches work for exactly this format.