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

What actually shows up when you look for WOWK's football Player of the Week

Search for it and you land on one live page, not an archive. WOWK 13 News, the Huntington-Charleston station Nexstar owns under the "13 News" brand, runs a weekly Player of the Week feature for West Virginia high school football each fall, posted at wowktv.com/sports/high-school-sports/. There's no searchable list of every winner since the program started. What's confirmed for the 2025 season is narrower: two separate weeks, Week 10 and Week 14, each closed with a named honoree on the record. This page doesn't repeat those names. Not because they're secret, but because a program built around teenage athletes doesn't need a vote-buying site keeping their names in circulation years later.

That two-week confirmation matters more than it sounds. It proves the cycle, nomination, coverage, a public announcement, actually completes more than once in a single fall, on a station whose sports desk covers a wide stretch of southern West Virginia. Whether the feature ran every week of the 2025 season or only some of them isn't something this guide can state as fact. Check wowktv.com for the current week's post before assuming anything about frequency, the way you would for any program with this thin a public paper trail. For the general shape of how a fan-vote feature like this typically runs once it's live, the online contest voting guide covers ground that applies regardless of which West Virginia station or newspaper is running it.

The two confirmed 2025 weeks, and what a two-week record can and can't prove

Week 10 and Week 14. Those are the two dated results confirmed for this program's 2025 run, each with its own named honoree that this guide isn't reproducing. Nothing else about those specific weeks, how many nominees appeared on the ballot, what the vote count looked like, which county the winner came from, made it into the record checked for this page.

Here's what the gap between those two numbers suggests, cautiously. West Virginia's WVSSAC football season runs a roughly ten-game regular schedule before four rounds of playoffs begin. Week 14 lands close to where a state championship weekend typically falls. If that overlap holds, WOWK kept naming a Player of the Week deep into the postseason, not just during the regular season. This brief doesn't confirm that connection directly, so treat it as an educated read of the calendar rather than a stated fact.

Reading that table plainly: this is a real, functioning local media feature with a genuine broadcast organization behind it, not a guess-worthy or possibly-defunct page. It's just thinner on public documentation than some of West Virginia's other fan-vote polls, the ones hosted on a national sports-media platform with years of dated posts behind them.

How a local-station poll like this differs from West Virginia's SI-hosted ballots

West Virginia already has two other statewide football fan-vote programs on record, both run by High School on SI rather than a local TV newsroom. The SI-hosted ballots state plainly that fans can vote as often as they want, no per-fan cap, through an embedded widget on si.com. WOWK's own football feature doesn't publish that same language anywhere this guide could find. That's a real, structural difference, not a minor one. A national platform spelling out its rules in writing is a different animal from a regional newsroom that may simply run a poll widget without a public terms page attached to it.

Ownership differs too. Nexstar operates WOWK as a local broadcast property covering the Huntington-Charleston market. SI's West Virginia hub sits inside a national sports-media company publishing the same Athlete of the Week format across dozens of states from one editorial system. Neither structure is better for a voter. They're just different enough that assuming WOWK's rules mirror SI's, unlimited voting, no account, a fixed weekly close, would be guessing dressed up as knowledge. The two organizations don't share a platform, so there's no reason their fine print should match.

The practical takeaway: read whatever terms WOWK actually posts alongside that week's article before building any real push around this ballot. A rule borrowed from the general West Virginia Athlete of the Week ballot and applied here could be flatly wrong.

The Tri-State football map behind a Huntington-Charleston newsroom

WOWK broadcasts out of the Huntington-Charleston market, the same television footprint the Herald-Dispatch's Best in the Tri-State readers' poll covers on the business side, just for football scoreboards instead of storefronts. That's a wide stretch of ground: Cabell County around Huntington, Kanawha County around Charleston, plus Wayne, Putnam, Mason, and Logan counties fanning out from both cities. A newsroom covering that whole footprint on a Friday night has a deep bench of programs to pull a weekly nominee from: Huntington High and Cabell Midland in Cabell County, George Washington, Capital, South Charleston, Nitro, and St. Albans across Kanawha County, Hurricane and Winfield in Putnam County, Spring Valley over in Wayne County, Point Pleasant up along the Ohio River in Mason County, Logan further south.

None of that is a claim about who's actually shown up on a WOWK ballot. This guide doesn't have a nominee list to check school names against, so treat it as geography, not a roster. West Virginia football itself runs across four WVSSAC enrollment classes, AAAA down to A, and nothing confirmed here says whether WOWK's own weekly feature separates by class or runs one open field the way the SI ballots do. A market this size, spanning a state capital, a mid-sized river city, and a lot of rural county programs in between, is exactly the kind of footprint where that classification question actually changes who gets noticed.

For the rest of what's tracked across the state, the West Virginia contest hub lists every program alongside this one, sport and business alike.

Running real outreach when the rulebook itself is this short

A short public rulebook doesn't mean no rulebook. It means the safest campaign is the boring one: read whatever WOWK actually posts next to that week's nominees, share the exact dated article link, not just the general sports section, so supporters land on the right poll instead of last month's, and skip any tactic that assumes a cap or an account requirement this guide can't confirm either way.

Real reach still comes down to the same handful of channels it always does for a program like this: team group chats, booster clubs, school social accounts, a coach willing to post the link once. Because this ballot draws from a broad, multi-county market rather than one town, a nominee from a smaller Logan County or Mason County program is competing against schools with a bigger built-in Charleston or Huntington audience by default. A smaller program is more likely to close that gap by asking supporters to come back throughout the week than by hoping one big push on day one carries the whole distance.

Once that organic network is tapped out and a gap remains before the feature's likely close, paced vote support built for sports fan polls is worth reading against whatever terms WOWK has actually posted for that week, not against a rule copied from a different station's ballot. The baseline worth checking first either way is is buying votes legal, since the honest answer depends on matching real support to the platform's real terms, not on volume alone.