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

The thing most Wisconsin voters don't know before they arrive

Two organizations run statewide weekly fan votes here. That is the problem. And if you don't sort it out before you start voting, you can run a solid campaign on the wrong ballot entirely.

High School on SI splits the award into two separate polls: an offensive Player of the Week and a defensive Player of the Week, both hosted at si.com/high-school/wisconsin. So Max Glab of Grafton — listed with 17 tackles, 10 tackles for loss, and 4 sacks on the Nov. 5 and Nov. 19 ballots — never competes against a 500-yard rusher in the same race. They run in parallel, close Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT, and require no account. No per-vote cap is stated on either SI poll.

Bound Wisconsin is something else entirely. It is an independent Wisconsin prep sports outlet that combines offense and defense on one ballot, caps each voter at once per day, and closes Thursday afternoon — before the SI window even opens for most weeks. Kingston Allen of Notre Dame Academy appeared on both platforms across multiple weeks of the 2025 season, which meant his supporters were running two distinct campaigns simultaneously: daily votes on Bound Wisconsin through Wednesday night, then unlimited voting on SI through Sunday. That is not duplication — those are two separate contests with two separate results, and winning one has no effect on the other.

Getting this wrong is the most common mistake. Sending your supporter base to the SI offensive poll link when your nominee is only on Bound Wisconsin — or vice versa — wastes every vote. Sort the platform first, then mobilize.

What the confirmed 2025 nominees reveal about this ballot

The research covers five offensive SI ballots, two defensive SI ballots, and six Bound Wisconsin ballots from the 2025 season. A few things become clear fast.

Kingston Allen of Notre Dame Academy (Green Bay) is the most documented individual presence — appearing on SI's offensive poll in the weeks of Oct. 7, Nov. 5, and Nov. 18, and on Bound Wisconsin from Week 1 straight through Level 1 of the playoffs. His best confirmed single game: 502 rushing yards and 7 touchdowns against Slinger in the first-round WIAA playoffs. He also carried 32 times for 238 yards and 6 touchdowns on the Nov. 18 SI ballot, and posted 251 yards and 4 touchdowns for Bound Wisconsin in Week 1. Repeated nominations on two platforms across the entire season are unusual enough that it points to something beyond statistical excellence — it points to a school community that organized early and kept going, which is a Notre Dame Academy Catholic alumni network spread across northeast Wisconsin rather than a single neighborhood attendance zone.

On the defensive side, the back-to-back nominations are just as telling. Max Glab of Grafton was listed with identical numbers on both Nov. 5 and Nov. 19: 17 tackles, 10 TFLs, 4 sacks. Braylon Stegall of West De Pere went 16 tackles, then 19 tackles in consecutive playoff weeks. Two players repeating in back-to-back weeks during the deepest stretch of the WIAA playoffs — when most communities pull back because "the season is almost over" — says something about those programs.

Stratford, a smaller-division Tiger program out of Marathon County, posted that multi-stat Vanderhoof line on Bound Wisconsin in the same week D1 nominees from Franklin and Sussex Hamilton appeared on SI. The WIAA's seven-division enrollment system determines playoff brackets at Camp Randall on championship weekend. It does not filter the fan-vote ballot. A Stratford nominee and an Arrowhead (7× state champion, 2025 D1 title) nominee face the same crowd.

Running a campaign when the close days don't match

The practical coordination problem in Wisconsin is straightforward: two polls, different close days, and a community trying to support one nominee on both has to manage two distinct timelines without burning people out.

Bound Wisconsin closes Thursday. The effective campaign window opens when Bound Wisconsin posts its nominees — typically mid-week — and runs through Wednesday night, when each supporter's final daily vote lands. The once-per-day cap makes the arithmetic transparent: a community of 200 people each voting once a day for four days generates 800 votes maximum. That is the ceiling. Reaching more people is the only lever — pushing one person to vote more often doesn't move it.

SI closes Sunday. The window after the Monday or Tuesday article post runs through Friday and Saturday, when most supporters are between games, checking phones during halftime. Sunday itself tends to go quieter as attention shifts; the campaign that seeded momentum Thursday through Saturday doesn't need a last-minute sprint because those votes are already in. And because the SI offensive poll carries no daily cap, sports fan-poll vote support operates on the same logic as any uncapped weekly poll: more reach, more volume, more total.

Notre Dame Academy's pattern across 2025 is the clearest available picture of what sustained organization looks like on both platforms simultaneously. A private Catholic school in Green Bay, drawing alumni from across northeast Wisconsin, ran Kingston Allen on both Bound Wisconsin and SI from September through the November playoff round. That does not happen by accident — it happens when the same network gets asked to take the same action, week after week, with accurate instructions about which link to use and when.

For Wisconsin's other statewide contests, the /usa/wisconsin/ directory collects them; the full national fan-vote index is at /usa/.