West Virginia High School Football Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Four West Virginia fan-vote football and athlete polls are running right now — here's what separates them

Search "West Virginia athlete of the week vote" this time of year and four different ballots can plausibly turn up. High School on SI runs two separate West Virginia polls off the same si.com/high-school/west-virginia hub: a year-round, all-sport Athlete of the Week ballot, and a fall-only, football-specific edition that runs alongside it during the WVSSAC football season. WTRF 7 in Wheeling runs two more, entirely unrelated to SI: a general Athlete of the Week vote for its own Ohio Valley market, and a football-only Elite Roofing Elite Player of the Week ballot sponsored separately. Four polls. Two organizers. Two geographic footprints.

Two of the four never touch each other's ballot. A Wheeling Park nominee could plausibly appear on all four in the same October week: the statewide SI football ballot, the statewide SI general ballot, WTRF's market-only Athlete of the Week, and WTRF's Elite Roofing football ballot. None of the four organizations coordinate nominations with the others. For a broader look at how fan-vote polls like these are typically structured, the online contest voting guide covers the general mechanics before the West Virginia specifics below.

When the football-only ballot actually beats the all-sport version

The general Athlete of the Week ballot pools nominees from every WVSSAC sport into one weekly vote — football, volleyball, cross country, soccer, and golf all competing for the same slot in an August or September post. A cross-country runner and a quarterback splitting the same ballot dilutes a football supporter's odds of even seeing their program's nominee land a spot, let alone win it.

The football-only edition removes that competition. During fall weeks, this ballot's field is football and nothing else, so a football program's realistic path to a nomination runs through other football performances that week, not through however many other sports the editorial desk happened to feature. That distinction matters most in the densest weeks of the season. Mid-October, when playoff positioning sharpens performances across every classification, is when the general ballot would otherwise be crowding football out with cross-country regional results and volleyball tournament runs.

Outside football season, this ballot simply doesn't run. The general, all-sport Athlete of the Week continues through winter basketball and spring track without a football-specific counterpart. That's the trade the two ballots make with each other: broader year-round coverage on one side, sharper in-season focus on the other. Neither replaces the other; they run on separate clocks entirely.

What's actually confirmed about who shows up on the ballot, and what isn't

No public archive lists past nominees or winners for this specific football edition, and inventing a name or a tally here would just be a guess dressed up as research. What is confirmed: the URL, si.com/high-school/west-virginia, carried active West Virginia content through the 2024 season and remains active into 2025 — a two-year continuity that at least rules out a one-off or abandoned program.

WVSSAC covers football across four enrollment classes, AAAA down through A, and the state's largest programs cluster in a handful of counties: Berkeley and Kanawha in the east and center, Cabell in the Huntington area, Ohio and Harrison in the north. A statewide football ballot with no classification filter puts a Class A program from a county with a few hundred students at its high school on the same weekly field as a Class AAAA program several times that size. Nothing about the ballot format weights for enrollment.

What that means practically: a search for confirmed nominee history on this specific football edition returns nothing citable. Anyone claiming otherwise for this particular ballot isn't working from published data. The honest baseline is the URL's confirmed two-season continuity, WVSSAC's four-class structure, and the fact that this runs as a separate program from its all-sport sibling. Nothing more specific sits on the public record for this edition.

How the si.com football ballot actually runs, week to week

Every SI-hosted West Virginia poll on this hub, football or general, follows the same basic shape: a dated article goes up on si.com/high-school/west-virginia with the week's nominees, an embedded voting widget sits inside that article, and the ballot runs until a close time stated on that specific post. No fixed weekly calendar gets published separately from the posts themselves; each article carries its own deadline, and that deadline can shift around playoff scheduling or a holiday week.

Voting through the widget doesn't require an account, a login, or a payment, consistent across every High School on SI ballot in this state, football and general alike. What isn't confirmed for this specific edition is a fixed vote cap. Some SI-hosted polls elsewhere publish an explicit one-vote-per-fan rule; others state no limit at all. For this football ballot, checking the exact rule printed on that week's live post is the safer approach than assuming either format.

Because the article itself, not a static hub page, is where the ballot actually lives, older posts from prior weeks stay online with expired polls long after voting closes. Confirming the publish date before sharing a link avoids sending supporters to a dead ballot — a mistake that costs real turnout on any weekly SI or WTRF poll in this state.

Building a real campaign on a statewide ballot instead of a market-limited one

The structural advantage of a statewide football ballot over WTRF's Wheeling-market Elite Roofing vote is reach. A program in Princeton, Mercer County, competing on the WTRF ballot would never even qualify; that poll only draws from the Northern Panhandle and Ohio Valley. On the statewide SI football edition, the same Princeton program stands on equal footing with a Northern Panhandle nominee, and neither side gets a geographic head start built into the ballot itself.

What that means for organizing support: a statewide ballot rewards networks that extend beyond one county. WVU and Marshall alumni chapters, statewide booster associations, and out-of-state family connections all carry weight here in a way they simply can't on a market-scoped poll like WTRF's. A program with a modest home enrollment but a large diaspora of alumni scattered across Ohio, Virginia, and beyond has a genuine structural opening on a statewide ballot that a locally scoped one would close off entirely.

Timing still runs on the same football-week clock as the market polls. Friday night results feed directly into the following post, so outreach that starts the moment that post goes live captures more of the voting window than outreach that waits until midweek. When organic reach across county lines and alumni networks has been fully tapped and a program is still short, paced vote support for sports fan polls is worth reading against that week's own posted rules first. For the rest of West Virginia's fan-vote programs, including polls with nothing to do with sport, see the Best in the Tri-State readers' poll, the West Virginia contest hub, and the national USA contest index.