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

The September 28 race tells you more than the mechanics table ever could

Start with the result that explains the most about how this poll works. Raekwon Anderson of Roselle won the September 28, 2025 ballot with 4,652 votes and 51%. Cayson Williams of Matawan took roughly 48% and an estimated 4,356 votes. The margin was close to 300 votes out of nearly 9,000 cast — two Union County and Monmouth County communities running at full speed for six days, with the finish not confirmed until Sunday night.

That race sits next to the October 7 finish where Jah'naad Cady of Franklin beat Jack Cannon of Holmdel 48% to 46%. Both were genuine contests, but the mechanisms differed. The September 28 poll was a high-turnout fight between two activated communities; the October 7 poll was closer to a toss-up where neither community separated from the other until the final hours. A campaign entering either type of week needs to know which one it is facing, because the tactics are different.

Weeks like Jack Kristjanson's November 84% or Dylan Boehm's 79.7% in October look like different polls entirely — one school mobilised and the rest did not. Those are not better or worse weeks; they are weeks where the competitive context happened to be lopsided. The NJ weekly poll can be a blowout or a photo finish depending on which communities show up, and the same school can land in either category in different weeks of the same season.

Who gets on the ballot, and how the field is built

High School on SI's New Jersey editors nominate the weekly field from Friday night game results, drawing from the full range of New Jersey football — Non-Public A and B private programs, and NJSIAA Groups 1 through 5 across the North, Central, and South sections. A season that puts Phillipsburg (Group 4, Warren County, far western NJ) and St. Peter's Prep (Non-Public A, Hudson County, directly across the Hudson from Manhattan) on the same ballot is not an anomaly; it is how the editorial team structures every week.

Nominations can be submitted to jbeisser86@gmail.com or by tagging @HighSchoolonSI on X or Instagram. A submission that arrives by Saturday night with the complete stat line — rushing yards, passing yards, touchdowns, opponent, and score — gives the editors what they need before the ballot is set. The team also tracks performances independently, but a standout game in a lower-coverage county that nobody flags can be missed. Warren County's Sam Dech earned three nominations in 2025 because his performance line kept appearing; a player from a similarly off-the-radar market who has no one submitting on their behalf may not get the same attention regardless of the stat sheet.

Aiden Upham of Pitman — Group 1, the smallest public classification — won the September 30 poll at 56% with 1,998 votes against a field that included Group 3 and Non-Public nominees. The division structure does not determine outcomes here. Enrollment stops mattering the moment the ballot opens; turnout is what runs.

Poll mechanics: what is fixed and what varies week to week

Nine confirmed 2025 polls ran from September 7 through November 28, every one closing on a Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The article for each week states the exact close time; always verify against the live article at si.com/high-school/new-jersey, since a playoff scheduling shift can occasionally adjust the timeline. Results post in a follow-up article Monday or Tuesday.

The football-only scope is worth noting because it shapes how share messages travel. A message that says "vote for [Name] from [School] in this week's NJ High School Football Player of the Week poll" requires no clarification about which sport or which award — unlike state polls that bundle football with basketball, wrestling, and other fall sports into a single weekly ballot. That specificity reduces friction for the recipient and tends to produce cleaner click-through.

What the NJ community map means for any given week's contest

New Jersey's prep football communities are not uniformly distributed, and understanding where the density sits is most of the strategy for anyone trying to move a weekly tally.

The Bergen County Non-Public A programs — Bergen Catholic, Don Bosco Prep, St. Joseph Regional — carry alumni networks that span decades and stretch well beyond the county. Don Bosco's alumni include graduates now working in New York City, in South Jersey, and in other states; when a nominee appears from that program, the outreach chain is not a school community — it is a regional Catholic alumni network. St. Peter's Prep in Jersey City operates in a similar model but anchored to Hudson County's dense Catholic community, which runs across county lines into Essex and Bergen.

Shore Conference programs in Monmouth and Ocean counties — Rumson-Fair Haven, Red Bank Catholic, Holmdel, Brick Memorial — carry large fan bases accustomed to following prep sports coverage closely. Holmdel's Jack Cannon appeared on the ballot three times in 2025, never winning; that three-nomination run with a 46% runner-up finish tells you the Holmdel community mobilises at a competitive level but did not find the extra margin against Franklin's network in October.

The contrast worth holding onto: Phillipsburg (Warren County, Group 4) won at 77% and earned three nominations the same season. Phillipsburg sits in a geographically isolated western-NJ community where the football program is a central part of town identity — not a suburban county where dozens of programs compete for the same social-media attention on the same night. Isolation, in fan-poll terms, is an asset. A community that has one team to rally around and one link to share has a structural advantage over a county where voters are splitting attention across several nominees in the same week. That is the actual dynamic the 2025 data confirms: Sam Dech's Warren County network activated at 77%, while Jack Cannon's Monmouth County network — deeper in a shore-region media market full of competing programs — peaked at 46% across three separate nomination weeks. Both communities showed up; one had less structural noise between the link and the vote.

How that plays against the Bergen Catholic or Don Bosco alumni chain in a given week is an open question — no 2025 ballot put all three in the same week. But the data from the weeks that did happen points consistently in the same direction: the campaign that reaches a cohesive network and asks it to vote before Sunday evening wins more often than the campaign that reaches a wider audience and asks them to vote whenever. The live tally on the poll page tells you, in real time, whether you are running even with the field or behind it — which is more useful than any pre-week estimate. Structured vote-support is one way to close a gap the organic network cannot.