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

What 88% tells you before anything else

North Muskegon's Cullen Bartos won the Week 1 2024 Muskegon football Player of the Week with 88% of the vote. Hunter Osborne of Whitehall took 9%, Jonathan Pittman of Mona Shores 2%, and Porter Slominski of Newaygo 2%. That result — the highest confirmed winning share in any documented Michigan regional football POTW — is the single most useful thing a voter arriving here needs to understand, because it describes how this poll works in a way that a long mechanics table does not.

Mona Shores competes at Division 2, the same tier as Muskegon High School itself, and is one of the most recognized programs in west Michigan. In Week 1 2024, a Mona Shores nominee finished with 2% — the same share as Newaygo, a smaller D4-5 program from an adjacent county. Division size and enrollment did not determine the Week 1 result. What determined it was which school's community moved together before the Thursday 9 a.m. deadline, and North Muskegon's did.

The Muskegon ballot is also the smallest confirmed field among Michigan's documented regional football POTW polls — four nominees per week, confirmed from poll.fm/14626945, compared to eleven in Bay City and 34 or more in Kalamazoo. In a four-person race there is no long tail of low-count names absorbing votes. Every organized push lands on a tight target, which makes the gap between a prepared community and an unprepared one wider here than on the bigger Michigan ballots. Other Michigan fan-vote football polls are collected at the Michigan contests hub, and the national directory covers all 50 states.

The Thursday 9 a.m. deadline, and why it shortens the window

The Muskegon football POTW closes at 9 a.m. Thursday — confirmed directly from the Week 1 2024 ballot. Among Michigan's MLive regional football polls, it is the only one with a documented close time from a primary source. The Grand Rapids regional runs into Friday afternoon; the statewide MLive playoff ballot closes 9 a.m. Saturday. Muskegon is the earliest.

The practical consequence: Wednesday night is the last effective window for Muskegon campaigns. A share that goes out Thursday morning — when followers might check their phones during breakfast — arrives after the ballot is locked. Communities that treat Wednesday evening as the deadline, not Thursday, are the ones that consolidate the way North Muskegon did in Week 1.

The poll itself sits embedded inside the mlive.com article, not on a standalone page. Supporters who receive a link to the raw poll.fm widget URL rather than the full MLive article may find the ballot non-functional. The shareable asset is the mlive.com article link. For how weekly fan polls work across different platforms and how campaigns are typically structured, the how-to guide covers the recurring cadence.

North Muskegon, Mona Shores, and who the ballot actually draws from

The Week 1 2024 field covered two counties: Muskegon County (North Muskegon, Whitehall, Mona Shores) and Newaygo County (Newaygo). Those four nominees span Division 2 through Division 4-5 — and the Division 2 program did not win.

That outcome is worth understanding before any campaign. Mona Shores has appeared in MHSAA state championship games at Division 2, the same tier as Muskegon High School's Big Reds. Its fan base is large by west Michigan standards and its football culture is serious. Yet in Week 1 2024, Mona Shores finished third with 2% — tied with Newaygo, a considerably smaller program from a different county. Division 2 enrollment and statewide playoff pedigree did not convert into votes that week.

North Muskegon — a Division 3-4 school — won with 88% because its community organized first and moved together. The school is not the largest in the region; its alumni network is not the most geographically dispersed. What the Week 1 result shows is that the tightest communities in fan polls are not always the biggest ones. A program that can route a share link through one connected set of parent groups and booster chats before Wednesday night has an advantage over a larger program whose supporters are distributed across a metro area and respond at different speeds.

The ballot draws from up to fourteen programs — Muskegon High School, Mona Shores, North Muskegon, Whitehall, Newaygo, Reeths-Puffer, Fremont, Ravenna, Oakridge, Montague, Shelby, Hart, Hesperia, and Orchard View — but four nominees per week means most schools are not on the ballot on any given Tuesday. The ones that are nominated are the ones where MLive reporters saw a performance worth flagging from the weekend's games. For campaigns that want structured support beyond organic sharing, vote promotion services are built for open, turnout-decided polls like this one.