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

The number you need to know before you do anything else

Twenty-one votes. That is what separated Asher Ratliff of Columbus North from runner-up Jace Hollendonner of Centerville in Week 3 of the 2025 Indiana Preps Player of the Week poll — on a total of more than 6,000 votes cast. If you are planning a campaign around an Indiana Preps nomination and wondering whether it is worth the effort, that margin is your answer. This is a poll where the count is real, the margin is auditable, and 21 votes changes the headline.

Indiana Preps Sports Network publishes not just the winner's percentage but the vote gap and the total field count. That transparency is rarer than it sounds. Most fan-poll operators announce a winner and a percentage; Indiana Preps announces the margin. That practice is what makes a Week 3 number like 21 votes meaningful: it is not an estimate, and it is not rounded.

The Week 1 picture reinforces this. Dayson Kirby of Bedford North Lawrence won with 33.6% — a comfortable plurality but not a majority — on a ballot that included Ty Benton (26.4%) and Wyatt Bowling (19.5%). Three candidates within 14 percentage points of each other. In a 6,000-vote field that spread translates to a race where a few hundred motivated supporters can move between those positions.

What the confirmed nominees reveal about Indiana's football map

The two confirmed 2025 winners map neatly to the kind of geographic and class spread Indiana Preps captures statewide. Bedford North Lawrence — Kirby's school — sits in Lawrence County in southern Indiana, a program outside the Indianapolis suburban corridor that dominates 6A. Columbus North is in Bartholomew County, south-central Indiana, a larger program but not a member of the Indianapolis-area 6A bracket where Brownsburg, Center Grove, and Carmel compete.

That spread is the structure of Indiana's football map. The IHSAA's six enrollment classes — 6A through 1A — mean the statewide ballot can carry a nominee from a Lawrence County program with a regional community base alongside a nominee from a metro-area 6A school with a broader but more diffuse following. On the field they will never meet in the regular season. On the Indiana Preps ballot they are on the same list every week.

The 2024 IndyStar semistate-week ballot (13 nominees, now paywalled) extended this picture further: programs from Westfield, Heritage Hills, New Palestine, Warsaw, East Noble, Linton-Stockton, North Judson, and Fort Wayne Bishop Luers all appeared on one ballot. Every corner of the state, every IHSAA class. The Indiana Preps vote draws from the same statewide pool.

How the Indiana Preps poll actually works — and what it does not tell you

Indiana Preps posts the vote article Monday or Tuesday after the weekend's games. The URL pattern is consistent: inpreps.com/YYYY/MM/DD/vote-for-week-N-football-player-of-the-week/, and the hub at inpreps.com/indiana-preps-player-of-the-week/ links every active and past ballot. The winner announcement comes three to four days later — by Friday of the same week, based on the 2025 pattern.

The site does not publish a hard close time in the vote articles, which means the operative deadline is the span between the vote post and the winner announcement. Treat Wednesday night as the effective boundary for sustained push; the winner post has gone up by Friday in the confirmed 2025 weeks.

Nominations are explicitly open to everyone — fans, players, coaches — via email at indianapreps@gmail.com. Statistics are verified against MaxPreps before a player appears on the ballot. A nomination that arrives by Sunday with the player's full stat line, school, position, opponent, and final score is in the best position to make that week's field. Indiana Preps is also sponsored by the Indiana Minority Coaches Association, which connects the poll to a statewide coaching network that spans all six classes and every region of the state.

Running a campaign across Indiana's school geography

The Week 3 lesson is the one to carry into any Indiana Preps campaign: 21 votes on 6,000 cast. That means the margin is not won by one person voting repeatedly — it is won by one campaign reaching slightly more people than the other.

Indiana's school geography shapes how that reach works. A program like Bedford North Lawrence draws from Lawrence County's tight regional community — a fan base that knows the school as the county's anchor institution and can be activated quickly through local networks, booster clubs rooted in Bedford, and alumni distributed across southern Indiana cities. Columbus North draws from a mid-size city in Bartholomew County with its own distinct booster structure.

For either type of program, the mechanics of a real Indiana Preps push are the same: get the nomination in by Sunday, share the vote link the moment the article is live, and keep the link moving through every connected group — player group texts, the school's social accounts, booster-page posts timed across the vote window. The full state directory of Indiana fan votes is at /usa/indiana/, and the national poll guide lives at /usa/. For weekly open polls like this one — where the margin is confirmed at 21 votes and the total field exceeds 6,000 — every real reader vote is the margin.