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

What is the South Dakota High School Player of the Year award?

The South Dakota High School Player of the Year is an annual fan-vote football award administered by High School on SI — the prep sports vertical of Sports Illustrated, powered by SBLive Sports — and hosted at si.com/high-school/south-dakota. Each autumn, after the SDHSAA football state championships conclude in November, SBLive opens a public ballot listing the top South Dakota prep football candidates drawn from Class AA, A, and B programmes across the state. Readers vote freely with no account required, and the nominee who accumulates the most votes by the poll's close date is named Player of the Year.

• Operated by High School on SI / SBLive Sports, a national prep-sports network affiliated with Sports Illustrated Media Group — giving winners a nationally indexed, searchable credential.
• Covers SDHSAA Class AA, A, and B football statewide, meaning athletes from large Sioux Falls metro schools and small rural programmes compete on the same annual ballot.
• The 2024 poll recorded 17,475 total votes — demonstrating genuine statewide engagement well beyond a local newspaper feature.
• Voting is free; no Sports Illustrated subscription, no SBLive account, and no personal data are required to cast a ballot.
• The award is annual and football-specific — distinct from weekly, all-sport Athlete of the Week polls — making it the premier fan-decided POY credential for South Dakota prep football.
• Winners earn a published recognition on si.com, which is indexed by major search engines and frequently discovered by college recruiters searching a prospect's name.

With 17,475 votes in a single annual cycle, the SD POY poll generates more concentrated community engagement than most weekly polls in the state — because the entire year's football prestige is compressed into one ballot.

Which South Dakota football programmes appear on the POY ballot?

SBLive selects POY nominees from standout performers across the SDHSAA football season — including regular-season leaders in rushing yards, passing yards, and tackles, as well as players who performed in the state championship bracket. The table below lists schools whose athletes have appeared as contenders or are well-positioned to produce POY candidates based on their football programme strength and SDHSAA classification record.

South Dakota's SDHSAA football structure runs three distinct classifications. Class AA schools are the largest by enrollment — the four Sioux Falls public high schools (Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, O'Gorman), Harrisburg, Brandon Valley, Rapid City Stevens, Rapid City Central, Brookings, and others — and they dominate nominations due to both programme depth and larger supporter networks for online voting. Class A schools, which include regional powers like Winner, Bon Homme, and Howard, field competitive teams that often win state titles despite smaller student bodies. Class B encompasses the smallest schools, running nine-man football in some conferences.

The POY ballot frequently includes athletes from all three classes, which makes South Dakota's version of this award unusual compared to POY polls in states that restrict recognition to the largest classification. A Class B nine-man quarterback who throws 60 touchdowns in a season may appear alongside a Class AA running back from Harrisburg who rushed for 2,400 yards.

How does the South Dakota POY fan vote actually work?

The Player of the Year fan poll lives on si.com/high-school/south-dakota and is free to participate in — no Sports Illustrated subscription, no SBLive account, and no registration of any kind. The SBLive platform displays each nominee's name, school, classification, and position alongside a running vote count visible to all visitors. Readers click to vote; the widget confirms the submission and updates the live tally in near-real-time.

Because this is an annual award rather than a weekly poll, the total voting window is longer — typically several weeks following the SDHSAA state championship games in mid-November. That longer window changes the campaign math: it is less about hourly cap mechanics and more about sustained community mobilisation over days and weeks. For a plain-language breakdown of how online fan-vote polls work in general, see our online contest voting guide.

The platform enforces a device-based or session-based cap, consistent with SBLive's national poll infrastructure. Returning on a different device — a phone, a tablet, a household laptop — allows additional votes. The 17,475 total votes recorded in the 2024 SD football POY cycle reflect a genuine statewide turnout across an extended window, not a single-day spike.

How is the winner selected, and why does the SI affiliation matter?

The South Dakota High School Player of the Year winner is whichever nominee holds the highest vote count when the poll closes. SBLive editors control the ballot composition — selecting nominees from the season's standout performers based on statistical output and championship performance — but the final outcome is entirely decided by reader votes. There is no panel score, no editorial weight applied to the tally, and no tie-breaking mechanism beyond vote count.

1. Season review: following the SDHSAA state championships in November, SBLive's South Dakota editorial team compiles nominees from season statistics, coaching nominations, and state championship performances.
2. Ballot published: the POY ballot goes live at si.com/high-school/south-dakota; any reader anywhere can vote at no cost and without an account.
3. Voting window: the poll runs for several weeks; the close date is shown on the active ballot page and may vary year to year.
4. Winner announced: the nominee with the highest vote count at close is named South Dakota High School Player of the Year on si.com and across SBLive's social channels.

The Sports Illustrated affiliation matters for recruiting purposes in a way that a local newspaper recognition does not. A published POY credit on si.com carries the Sports Illustrated brand — one of the most recognised sports media names globally — and the page is indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines with domain authority that surfaces prominently when coaches search a recruit's name. For a South Dakota athlete pursuing FCS or Division II football opportunities at SDSU, USD, or Northern State, an SI-published award is a materially stronger credential than an unsponsored local honour.

Building votes for a South Dakota POY candidate — what actually works

The extended annual window and the statewide, multi-class structure of the SD POY poll create a different campaign environment than a weekly newspaper poll. Vote totals accumulate over weeks, not days. The Sioux Falls metro holds a structural advantage in raw numbers — four AA schools with alumni networks of thousands — but concentrated small-town networks have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to generate high per-capita vote rates when they treat the award as a community mission. Tactics worth deploying:

The Sioux Falls metro advantage — and how smaller schools overcome it

A Sioux Falls Lincoln or Harrisburg athlete automatically enters the POY campaign with access to the Sioux Falls metro's 200,000+ population base. Parents in Harrisburg and Brandon Valley — two of the fastest-growing communities in South Dakota — are active across neighbourhood Facebook groups, school app notifications, and booster club email threads. That networked density is hard to match in raw headcount.

But the SD POY's multi-class ballot creates a genuine path for Class A and B candidates. Communities like Winner (pop. ~2,800) or Bon Homme's Tyndall area are geographically isolated and socially tight-knit — when a local athlete earns a POY nomination, it is genuinely the biggest sports story in the community for the month. Social media sharing in small South Dakota towns has unusually high conversion rates because the audience knows the athlete personally. A Class B nine-man standout who gets his entire school district, all local businesses, and every parent at church voting will often outperform larger metro schools that treat the poll as a casual click.

For a complete strategic guide to online fan-poll vote campaigns, read our how-to guide. When organic networks have been fully activated and a candidate is still trailing, some families and booster clubs use a paid real-voter service to reach additional voters. If you take that route, use a service that delivers paced, genuine votes consistent with the platform's session mechanics — bulk rapid-fire injections are detectable and get stripped. Our sports fan poll votes service is structured around paced, cap-matched delivery for exactly this type of annual award poll.

POY poll rules and the buy-votes question

The South Dakota High School Player of the Year poll is a free fan-engagement award with no cash prize, no formal sweepstakes structure, and no South Dakota prize-promotion statute governing it. The applicable restrictions are the SBLive platform's own technical terms — primarily a prohibition on automated scripts and bot traffic that circumvent device-based session limits. For a full, balanced guide to legality across online polls, see our buy-votes guide.

The meaningful line runs between two structurally different activities:

• Automated bot scripts — rapid-fire requests that bypass session cooldowns, typically from data-centre IP ranges. These violate standard SBLive platform terms, produce anomalous traffic patterns, and result in vote removal when detected.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting genuine votes from their own devices within the platform's normal session mechanics. This is structurally equivalent to a more efficient distribution of the same "go vote" message a booster club email sends.

Whether paid outreach satisfies the spirit of this specific award's terms is a judgement each athlete, family, and school programme must make after reading the current official poll page. The risk in a fan-engagement award with no cash prize is primarily reputational — community and coaching perception — not legal or regulatory.

POY voting calendar — how the annual South Dakota football cycle works

The South Dakota Player of the Year award is pegged to the SDHSAA football calendar. The entire vote cycle — from season to nomination to poll close — fits within a roughly four-month window each year. The table below maps each stage to the SD football calendar.

The annual cadence means there is one chance per year to earn this recognition — unlike weekly polls where a new nomination is possible every season. That scarcity drives higher per-cycle engagement. The 17,475 votes recorded in 2024 reflect what a genuinely statewide voter mobilisation looks like when communities treat the outcome as meaningful.

Timing matters within the window. The first week after the ballot opens is typically the lowest-effort moment to build a lead — community awareness is freshest, championship-week buzz is still active, and competitors may not yet have activated their networks. A campaign that mobilises in the first 72 hours of the window and then maintains a steady weekly reminder typically holds an advantage over campaigns that launch late with a final-week burst.

For all South Dakota voting contests and recognition polls, visit our South Dakota contest hub. For the complete US guide directory, see the USA contest guide index. For context on general online voting mechanics, see our online voting guide.