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

Cedar Park versus the corridor — what the first confirmed winner reveals

Cameron Lacek won the Week 3 CenTex poll with 56.43% of the vote. That number is the starting point for understanding how this ballot behaves.

Vista Ridge beat Round Rock 30-29 — one point, late — which is the kind of game a community talks about for a week. Lacek was 12-of-19 for 186 yards and 3 touchdowns. Those are not video-game numbers; they are the efficient numbers of a quarterback who managed a close win against a solid opponent. SI editors noticed. And then Cedar Park voters — the current families, the alumni now scattered across the Austin suburbs — organized around one name and gave him more than half the ballot in an 11-candidate field. A clear majority in a week where 10 other nominees were also trying is a signal, not a coincidence.

The Cedar Park–Round Rock–Georgetown axis of the I-35 corridor produces this kind of result because those communities are newer, denser, and more connected through school-parent networks than older parts of Texas. A Vista Ridge parent group chat that reaches a thousand people is not unusual for that market. Neither is the response time — when the ballot goes up Sunday, the link can travel an entire suburban network before lunch.

The geography of the CenTex ballot — why it runs wider than it sounds

Central Texas sounds like a tidy regional descriptor. The actual ballot range is anything but tidy.

Week 9 (Oct 26, 2025) had 16 nominees. Read the schools: Pflugerville Hendrickson, Austin James Bowie, Austin Anderson, Round Rock Cedar Ridge, Georgetown East View, Hutto, Leander Rouse, Round Rock Westwood — those are 6A and 5A programs in fast-growing Austin suburbs where Friday night crowds can fill stadium seats with current students alone. Then on the same ballot: Fredericksburg, Blanco, and Little River Academy, small-town programs where football is the whole town's social event and the alumni network stretches to San Antonio, Houston, and Austin. And College Station A&M Consolidated, which sits in the shadow of a major university campus and draws on a different kind of booster energy entirely.

Week 4 made the spread even starker. Kase Evans of Lexington and Jayden Lucky of Troy were both on the same ballot as Liberty Hill, which had two nominees simultaneously. Lexington is UIL 2A. Troy is UIL 2A. Liberty Hill is 6A and one of the fastest-growing programs in the state. Three programs, radically different in size, all on the same list — and the vote doesn't weight any of them by enrollment. The 2A school with a tight-knit community that all know each other personally can match the 6A school whose fan base is larger but spread thin across a newer suburb.

That range is the structural fact that matters most for campaign planning. A Liberty Hill supporter thinking "we are a 6A school, we should dominate" ran into two nominees splitting their own community's votes in Week 4. A small-town Caldwell or Jarrell supporter thinking "we can't compete" may have underestimated how fast a connected small-town network can mobilize when the link hits the right group chat.

Sunday close, unlimited votes — and what those two facts mean together

The CenTex poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That is the same night as the statewide Texas Offensive and Defensive polls, and it is one full day earlier than the Dallas / North Texas regional, which closes Monday. For anyone supporting a nominee on multiple Texas ballots in the same week, Sunday night is the hard stop for this one.

The other thing to hold together with that deadline: the organizer's own language is explicit. "You can vote as often as you wish and are encouraged to share." There is no cap per hour, per day, or per device stated anywhere on the ballot pages. What that means in practice is that the contest is purely a reach problem. Getting 50 people to each vote 20 times is mathematically the same as getting 1,000 people to vote once — but one of those is dramatically easier to sustain through a full week, and one depends on the same small group staying engaged every day. The campaigns that hold up through Sunday are the ones that keep widening the circle: every player texting their own friend group, the team account posting Saturday and again Sunday, a booster or parent page sending one reminder the afternoon the poll closes.

Because the ballot is open and entirely turnout-decided, structured vote-support campaigns exist for polls that run on this mechanic. For a broader look at how weekly fan votes work, the how-to guide covers the recurring cadence; more Central and statewide Texas contests are at /usa/texas/, and the full national directory is at /usa/.