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

The close day is the first thing to check — and it is not always the same

Most fan-vote polls in the SI High School network work from a fixed deadline everyone on the ballot can plan around. The Missouri football poll does not. Each week's article states whether voting closes Sunday or Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific, and the day can shift from one week to the next. The November 18, 2025 poll — district championship week — closed Sunday, November 23. Other weeks in the same season closed Monday. A nominee's campaign that builds its messaging cadence around the wrong day can lose twelve hours of voting time it cannot recover.

This is the operational fact that separates Missouri from most of the SI state polls. A fixed-Monday close like the Dallas / North Texas regional ballot gives campaigns a predictable endpoint to work backward from. The Missouri statewide ballot does not offer that guarantee. Open the article, find the deadline sentence, and share it with everyone in the campaign before anything else.

The variability also affects when a new ballot appears. SI typically posts the new week's poll after the weekend's games are compiled — Sunday or Monday — and the window between opening and closing can be as short as one day or as long as two, depending on which close day applies. Supporters who check back early in the week and find the ballot already running have a meaningful head start.

Five 2025 winners — what the percentages reveal about field size

The confirmed 2025 record is a cleaner dataset than it appears at first. Five consecutive weeks of winners and percentages show a poll whose outcome swings widely based on how the vote splits across a large field:

Read the percentages, not just the names. When Frieze and Seitz each cleared 50%, their school communities were consolidating the vote while the rest of the field — which can include 20-plus nominees — was dividing it. When Holmes won at 28.53%, the field was larger and the vote more scattered; that single week demonstrates that a Missouri POTW race is sometimes won with just over a quarter of the total ballot. No percentage below roughly 28% has produced a confirmed winner in these weeks, but a campaign aiming for 55% is running a different race than one built to survive a 30-name split field at 25%.

There is also a geography signal in these results. Logan-Rogersville, Monett, Forsyth, and Carthage are all in southwest Missouri — the Ozarks corridor between Springfield and the Arkansas border. That cluster is not coincidence; southwest Missouri has a concentrated regional football culture and a school-community fabric where a poll link travels through tightly connected networks rather than diffuse metro social feeds. Webb City, also in that corridor, has 16 state titles and the community infrastructure to match. When a player from Carthage beats a Webb City opponent by 14 points and carries the ball 38 times, that performance concentrates the surrounding community's attention.

Class 1 through Class 6 and 8-man — on one ballot, settled by turnout

MSHSAA divides Missouri football into six enrollment-based classes and a separate 8-man division. Class 6 covers the largest 32 schools — programs like Liberty, Blue Springs, and Rockhurst drawing from metro Kansas City and suburban St. Louis. Class 1 reaches down to schools with under 119 students. The 8-man division serves programs too small for standard 11-man play.

The SI poll puts all of them on the same ballot. The November 18, 2025 field — district championship week — included Treven Riediger of Putnam County, a program from one of Missouri's smallest counties, alongside Wyatt Erickson of Blue Springs (402 passing yards, 3 TD) and Kingston Miles of St. Mary's South Side (247 rushing yards, 4 TD). Enrollment stops mattering the moment the ballot opens. What matters is which community can produce the higher share of votes from whatever supporter base it has — and a Class 1 school whose entire community is paying attention is not at a structural disadvantage against a Class 6 school with a large but loosely engaged fanbase.

CBC in St. Louis outscored opponents 489–143 in the 2025 regular season. Rockhurst is a consistent Class 6 playoff presence in Kansas City. Those programs have the raw volume of alumni and families that can produce large absolute vote counts when mobilized. But the five confirmed 2025 winners all came from Class 3, 4, or 5 schools in southwest Missouri — not from the large metro programs. That result is not a surprise to anyone who has watched how these polls resolve: a small city of 15,000 people whose football team is still alive in November is, in terms of engagement concentration, a different entity from a suburb of 80,000 where the school is one of a dozen competing attention demands.

Running a real campaign for this ballot

Two structural facts about the Missouri poll define how a campaign should work. First, the field is large — up to 31 nominees dividing the vote. Second, the deadline is variable. Both push the same direction: the campaign that starts earliest and reaches the widest circle of real supporters is the one that wins, not the one with the deepest single-source enthusiasm.

Getting nominated starts with a submission to SI's Missouri football editorial desk at si.com/high-school/missouri/football. A Saturday-night submission with the full stat line, the opponent, and the score gives editors the context they need before the ballot is built. A great performance that goes unsubmitted can be missed simply because 14 or more other stat lines arrived first.

Once the ballot is live, the campaign's job is reach. In southwest Missouri, where five of the confirmed 2025 winners played, that means town networks, booster organizations, and — for a school like Logan-Rogersville or Forsyth — the alumni who left for Springfield, Joplin, or Kansas City but still track their home team's results. The most activated of those out-of-town alumni can vote from wherever they are; geography is not a restriction. For Missouri contest pages and the national directory of school-sport fan votes, see /usa/. For a broader look at how these weekly open ballots work and the cadence that gets results, the how-to guide covers the mechanics; the vote-support overview explains what structured campaigns look like for polls like this. In a 20-plus-name field where 28% can be enough to win, a coordinated push into new supporter networks before the deadline is the margin that decides it.