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

Two nominees from one school: what the November 18 ballot reveals about this poll

Community School of Naples is a private school that would not fill the visitor section of Gulf Coast's stadium. On the November 18, 2025 ballot, it placed two nominees — Jayvian Tanelus and Ryder Brown — while every named public-school power in Lee County had zero. Tanelus had 5 touchdowns before halftime. Brown had 4 interceptions and returned one for a score. That is not a fluke in the data; it is how this poll works: nomination is performance, not enrollment, and winning belongs to whichever community organizes before Sunday night.

That result frames everything useful about the Southwest Florida ballot. On one side sit the established public programs — Gulf Coast, Cape Coral, Riverdale, North Fort Myers — drawing from large neighborhood fan bases spread across Lee County's suburban grid. On the other sit the private schools: Bishop Verot in Fort Myers, Community School of Naples in Collier County. Smaller enrollments, tighter alumni chains, parent networks that communicate through fewer, faster channels. The November 18 ballot showed what happens when that tight private-school network organizes in a week when it has two extraordinary performances to point to.

The poll does not care about enrollment. It cares about which community gets the direct article link in front of real people before Sunday night. A Catholic school parent network routed through a single group thread can move faster than a public school's more diffuse social presence — and the confirmed record bears that out.

What the confirmed 2025 nominees reveal

Across the September 24 and November 18, 2025 ballots, seven nominees appeared from six schools. The range of positions is notable: three running backs, a quarterback, a second quarterback, a multi-purpose athlete, and a defensive back all earned nominations across those two weeks.

Two details in that table are worth pausing on. First, the September 24 ballot carried both a QB and an RB from Lely — a signal that one strong team performance can produce multiple nominations, and that a school's supporters are not voting against themselves by splitting between two of their own players. Second, Ryder Brown's nomination is the only purely defensive line in both confirmed weeks. Four interceptions and a return touchdown is the kind of game that gets in front of editors regardless of which way the stat tends to lean, and it tells nominators something useful: an extraordinary defensive game competes on the same ballot as five-touchdown offensive nights.

No confirmed vote totals or winning percentages have been published for any Southwest Florida week. The record shows who was nominated, not who won or by how much — a real gap compared to the Dallas / North Texas ballot, where a 54.77% majority has been documented. That absence means there is no confirmed benchmark for what it takes to win here; the Sunday close and the community-network dynamics above are the clearest guides to scale.

Mechanics and timeline — what the Sunday close means for this corridor

The Southwest Florida poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — the same deadline as other SI Florida regional polls, and a full day shorter than the Monday close that Texas regional polls run to. That compressed window shapes everything about how a campaign here works.

A supporter who waits until Sunday morning to share the link has the whole day. A supporter who waits until Monday — which works in Texas — has missed the window entirely. The ballot typically opens sometime after the week's games are played, giving campaigns from roughly Sunday through Sunday night. Getting the direct article link out the moment the ballot goes live is not just best practice here; it is the difference between a full-week effort and a one-day sprint.

Three confirmed 2025 poll dates — August 26, September 24, November 18 — span preseason through late regular season and into the FHSAA playoff window. Additional weekly polls almost certainly ran between those dates; the FHSAA schedule runs August through December state championships. For how the SI weekly poll format works across all regions, the how-to guide explains the cadence. More Florida contests are listed at /usa/florida/.

Running a real campaign in Lee and Collier counties

Two things the confirmed record makes clear about how to compete here. First, get the direct article link — not a screenshot, not a description — in front of people as early in the ballot week as possible. Second, the Sunday close means the afternoon reminder is the last real push; there is no Monday recovery.

The community topology of this corridor matters for where that link goes. Naples and the Collier County private schools activate through concentrated parent and alumni networks — the kind of channels where one organized message reaches most of the relevant people quickly. Bishop Verot's Catholic alumni network in Fort Myers operates similarly. For the large Lee County public schools — Gulf Coast, Cape Coral, North Fort Myers — the fan base is broader and less centralized, which means the link needs to travel through more channels: school-run social accounts, booster club pages, team family threads, and local community groups simultaneously.

Neither community type has an inherent advantage. A Naples private school that activates fifty organized parents by Saturday night can outperform a Cape Coral school that posts once on Friday and waits. A Gulf Coast program that routes the link through three separate channels on Sunday can outperform a smaller school whose single thread goes quiet by noon. The poll is a measure of which community organized, not which community is largest.

For campaigns that want to go beyond organic reach, vote support services exist for open, unlimited fan polls of this type. The full national directory of weekly POTW polls lives at /usa/.