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

The thing about a 15-name ballot

Most fan polls of this type name six to eight nominees. North Carolina's SI / SBLive ballot names fifteen. That number is not incidental — it changes the math of every race. In a six-name field a single community that turns out at seventy percent of its network can take forty or fifty percent of the total vote outright. In a fifteen-name field the vote fragments across more schools, more counties, more fan bases, and the winner's share is smaller by default. A community that turns out at seventy percent of its network might still win — but it will win with a plurality, not a majority, against fourteen other communities doing the same thing.

J.J. Gulat of Dixon won that exact race twice. Week 2 of the 2025 season, Dixon was on a 15-name ballot alongside Hough (Huntersville, which would go on to win the first-ever 8A state title), South Mecklenburg, Jacksonville, and Charlotte Catholic. Gulat won. Six weeks later, in Week 4, the field included West Charlotte, Cardinal Gibbons, East Mecklenburg, and Croatan. He won again. Dixon is a Bulldog program in Holly Ridge, Onslow County — coastal North Carolina, about ninety miles from Raleigh and far from any metro football hub. Two wins from that starting point, in a statewide field, tells you more about how this poll works than any tactical guide could.

The lesson is not that Dixon is exceptional. It is that the six-day window and the 15-name split mean a compact, connected community has a structural edge over a larger fan base that turns out piecemeal. The vote is won by whoever fills the window, not whoever fills the stadium.

Winners through the first five weeks of 2025

Five weeks of the 2025 season have confirmed winners. The sequence reveals more than a name list:

Look at the geography: Lincoln County foothills, coastal Onslow County (twice), Cumberland County near Fayetteville, and Cabarrus County in the greater Charlotte orbit. Not one of the five confirmed winners came from Mecklenburg County proper — the state's most population-dense football market, home to Mallard Creek, Hough, Providence Day, and Charlotte Catholic, all of whom appeared as nominees in these same weeks. The Charlotte metro turns out plenty of football interest; it apparently does not consolidate that interest onto one candidate in the way that a tighter community does.

Week 5 is worth a separate note. The ballot included Kamari McDonald of Lexington, who recorded three pick-sixes in one game — reported as a North Carolina record. A historically unusual defensive performance made the ballot and did not win. Titus Troy of Northwest Cabarrus did. The poll is not a merit vote; it is a turnout vote. McDonald's game was remarkable; Troy's community was more organized.

The Sunday close, and the six days before it

The North Carolina poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — not Monday, as the Dallas / North Texas regional does, and not mid-week. The practical cadence is that a new ballot appears around Monday or Tuesday, sits open through the week, and the decisive stretch is Saturday night into Sunday as supporters make one last push before the wire.

Six days sounds like a long window. For most nominees it is not. The poll gets casual attention early in the week and concentrated attention late — which means the supporters who are still actively sharing the article link on Sunday have a disproportionate effect relative to a single big push on Monday that fades by Thursday. A campaign that treats the full six days as a sustained effort, with a deliberate final push Sunday, outperforms one that spends everything on the first day and goes quiet.

The other timing detail worth knowing: because SI does not publish a running vote count, no one outside the organizer can see who is winning mid-week. There is no scoreboard to chase. That information gap cuts both ways — a trailing nominee's supporters cannot see they are behind and redouble; a leading nominee's supporters cannot see they are ahead and relax. The only rational response is to treat every day as if the race is close, because for 2025's confirmed weeks, most of them were.

For a broader look at how weekly fan votes unfold across the country, the how-to guide covers the general cadence. More North Carolina contests are indexed at /usa/north-carolina/, and the full national directory is at /usa/.

North Carolina's new 8-class landscape — and why it does not change the poll

Starting with the 2025–29 cycle, the NCHSAA expanded from four classifications to eight — the first expansion since 1959. The new structure runs from 1A (smallest enrollment) to 8A (the 32 largest programs, a tier that did not exist before). Hough won the inaugural 8A state championship in December 2025, going 15-0 and beating Millbrook 21-0 in the final. Grimsley took the 7A title at 15-0. Shelby's 84-41 win over Kinston in the 3A final was the highest-scoring championship game of the eight.

That classification context matters for understanding who appears on the ballot — but it does not determine who wins it. The SI / SBLive poll nominates from all eight classes on a single statewide list, and the confirmed 2025 winners came from programs scattered across the spectrum. A Division 1A or 2A coastal school (Dixon) won the same ballot that Hough was nominated on. Enrollment tier is the starting point for a football program's budget and roster depth; on the weekly poll, it is irrelevant.

What does matter is the kind of community the school sits inside. The Charlotte metro holds North Carolina's largest football fan base in raw terms, spread across Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties. The Triad — Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point — runs a second concentration of programs, led by Grimsley in 2025. The Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) adds another layer, with Cardinal Gibbons and Millbrook among the perennial names. And then there are the coast, the foothills, and the mountain programs — smaller in absolute size, often more centralized in how their communities communicate. Dixon is from that last category, and it won twice. The poll rewards density of activation, not density of population.

Because the ballot is open to all and decided entirely by reach before Sunday's close, structured vote-support campaigns exist for weekly polls like this one.