South Carolina High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing this poll does not tell you

Most fan-vote polls show a leaderboard. Some post a percentage. A few publish the raw count after the poll closes. The South Carolina High School Football Player of the Week does none of those things. The running tally is invisible, the margin at close is never published, and the only number you ever get is zero — because there is no number. The winner's name appears in the next week's article, and that is the full public record.

That single fact changes how a campaign here should think about itself. In a poll where you can watch a percentage climb, a team can see when it is ahead and pace accordingly. Here, you are voting into a black box that closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific and reveals nothing until Tuesday. The only rational response is to treat every hour before Sunday night as though the race is close — because there is no data that says otherwise.

The second thing worth knowing before you do anything else: the ballot is not three names or six names. The South Carolina poll runs roughly 15 nominees every week — confirmed at exactly 15 in multiple 2025 polls. On a 15-name ballot the vote is split many ways, and a plurality of 20 to 25 percent can win. That changes the arithmetic of a campaign. You do not need to beat one rival by a wide margin; you need to hold a lead against a fractured field where no one else consolidates either.

What the confirmed winners reveal about this ballot

Four winners are confirmed across the 2024–25 season, and they point in different directions on the state map.

Jamar Grissett won for Irmo in Week 0 (Aug 26, 2025 ballot). One week later, Drevon Dopson won for Irmo again — the same school, back-to-back weeks. Irmo is in Lexington County, a program that finished 2025 as 4A state champion over James F. Byrnes 35–32, and its two-week run on the SI ballot tracked that momentum in real time. The practical signal: when a school is hot and its community is already activated from playoff success, the fan-vote poll reflects it. Irmo did not win once and go dormant; its supporters stayed engaged for a second consecutive ballot.

Aiden Gibson of Woodruff won the week of Oct 20, 2025. Woodruff is a 3A program in Spartanburg County — not a school competing against Dutch Fork or Summerville on Friday nights in any bracket they share. On the ballot, it won anyway. Khalid Sherman of Loris won in December 2024; Loris is 2A. Two of the four confirmed winners came from programs at 3A or below, competing on the same ballot as 5A Division I nominees.

The table below sets out what we know for each confirmed winner:

What the table does not show is anyone from Dutch Fork — the program that won four consecutive 5A DI state titles from 2022 through 2025 under Tom Knotts. Kyle Henry appeared as a Dutch Fork nominee on the Oct 27 ballot, but the confirmed winner that week is Aiden Gibson of Woodruff. The state's dominant on-field program has not produced a confirmed ballot winner in this data set. That is the clearest illustration available that enrollment and recent playoff success are not reliable predictors of poll outcomes here.

A ballot that stretches from the Lowcountry to the Upstate

South Carolina's geography shapes the fan vote in ways that are not obvious from the nominee list. The state runs roughly 220 miles from the Upstate counties bordering North Carolina down to the Lowcountry coast, and the communities along that corridor do not share media markets, alumni networks, or anything else beyond the same SCHSL classification ladder.

The Oct 27, 2025 ballot spanned that full range: Tre Segarra from James F. Byrnes in Duncan (Spartanburg County, Upstate), Connor Dantzler from James Island (Charleston County, Lowcountry), Grayson Rimpf from Camden (Kershaw County, Midlands), Trevon Williamson from Gray Collegiate Academy in West Columbia. Schools from the Greenville metro, the Columbia suburbs, the Charleston coast, and points between were on the same 15-name list the same Sunday. A campaign mobilizing votes in Horry County for a Loris nominee is drawing on a community that has essentially no overlap with one pushing for a Dutch Fork player in Irmo.

That geographic spread is worth naming plainly: there is no single media voice or alumni chain that covers the whole ballot. A school in Spartanburg County running a strong campaign does not crowd out a school in Beaufort County — they are drawing on entirely separate pools. The ballot does not reward the team with the widest statewide reach; it rewards the team whose specific community consolidates before Sunday night closes. Loris winning in December 2024 is the proof — a 2A school from Horry County, drawing on one tight coastal community, beating whatever field it faced that week.

Getting on the ballot and running a real Sunday campaign

Two separate problems decide any week here: getting your player's name into the 15, and then moving real people to the poll before Sunday night.

The Dallas / North Texas ballot posts a direct nomination email (Bob Lundeberg). The South Carolina poll's editorial contact is not as publicly listed, but the mechanism is the same: SI's South Carolina editors build the field from the weekend's results and community outreach. A complete performance summary — player, school, position, stat line, opponent and score — submitted to the editorial team by Saturday night gives the editors what they need before the ballot is assembled. A strong game that nobody flags can be passed over for one someone advocated for.

Once the ballot is live, the 15-name field means you do not need a majority — you need to hold a lead against a split. The practical job is reaching real people who will vote Sunday, not cycling one device through the weekend. Every player texting their own circle, the school's social accounts posting Saturday and again Sunday morning, an alumni group getting a reminder before the close: those are the contacts that decide it. Because the total is hidden and the close is Sunday, the last few hours matter more than the early tally you cannot see anyway.

For campaigns that need a structured edge on a 15-name ballot before Sunday closes, sports fan-poll vote support is built for exactly this kind of weekly, open, uncapped poll. The broader mechanics of recurring fan votes are covered in the how-to guide; other South Carolina contests are at /usa/south-carolina/ and the national directory at /usa/.