Houston / SE Texas High School Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The poll that spans from Cypress to the Louisiana border

Most regional high school polls cover a metro area. The Houston / SE Texas Player of the Week covers something closer to a geographic corridor: the October 27, 2025 ballot drew 16 nominees from schools stretching roughly 80 miles, from Cypress Springs in northwest Harris County all the way to East Chambers in Chambers County near the Louisiana state line, with Bay City in Matagorda County anchoring the southern edge. That is not a metro poll; it is three distinct Texas football communities on a single ballot.

What that breadth produces is a community map you have to actually read. North Shore and Katy and Atascocita are Greater Houston powers with deep ISD-wide networks. East Chambers and Bay City are tight-geography communities whose football identity runs generations deep and whose link-sharing, when it activates, moves fast through a small town. Waller and Iowa Colony and Willis sit in the suburban expansion ring — newer communities with growing booster cultures that are still consolidating. Strake Jesuit in southwest Houston operates through the city's Catholic alumni chain, which reaches far outside any single ISD. Sixteen schools, four different community topologies, one ballot, one Monday deadline.

The structural fact that defines every outcome here: this is a larger field than any other confirmed Texas SI regional football ballot. The Dallas / North Texas poll had six nominees on its December 9, 2025 quarterfinal ballot. Houston had sixteen in October. In a six-name race a school can sometimes win by sheer size. In a sixteen-name race the community that organizes fastest around a single nominee wins; raw size alone cannot overcome a fractured vote.

The 16-name October 2025 field: what the ballot actually says

The October 27, 2025 cycle is the only confirmed ballot week on record for this poll. Every name and school below comes directly from the SI poll page for that date.

Seven of the sixteen nominees came from UIL 4A programs or the TAPPS private-school track — schools that would never share a district with a 6A program on any UIL playoff path. Here they are on the same line as Cypress Springs, Humble Kingwood, and Spring Westfield. That is the point: the ballot does not inherit UIL's enrollment-sorting logic. JD Zurby, competing for East Chambers out of Chambers County, lands on the same page as Khylan Davis of Fort Bend Hightower. Those two programs exist in completely different corners of the Houston football map, and on a Monday ballot they are direct rivals.

Timothy Potts of C.E. King is the ballot's most operationally notable name: he appeared on both this regional Houston poll and the statewide Texas Offensive Player of the Week ballot in the same season. His supporters in October 2025 were running two separate campaigns simultaneously — the statewide poll closing Sunday, the Houston regional closing Monday — with different fields and different deadlines on each. That is the kind of dual-campaign coordination the Monday close creates.

Monday close, four networks, and how the math actually works

The Houston / SE Texas poll closes Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — the same close time as the Dallas, East Texas, and San Antonio regional polls. The statewide Offensive and Defensive Player of the Week ballots close Sunday. That one-day gap is where campaigns either win or lose the last few hundred votes.

Houston's social topology explains why the Monday deadline rewards specific campaign design. The region does not have one unified fan network. Galena Park ISD (North Shore, C.E. King) is its own gravity field in northeast Houston. Humble ISD (Atascocita, Kingwood) runs a separate but equally large network in the north suburbs. Fort Bend ISD covers the southwest corridor. The communities east of Houston — La Marque, East Chambers, Bay City — are geographically separated from the metro and largely self-contained. Strake Jesuit's boosters overlap with none of those ISDs; they span the city through the Catholic alumni network.

What that fragmentation means in practice: a nominee from Humble Kingwood cannot automatically convert Katy fans, even though both are large 6A northwest Houston programs. They share a market but not an identity. A campaign that identifies its actual social graph — which ISD accounts, which parent groups, which alumni chains — and works those specifically will outperform one that blasts generically into the Houston metro. The 16-name field makes that focus more important, not less: with that many nominees splitting votes, a concentrated network that moves together is the difference between first and sixth.

What a real Houston / SE Texas campaign looks like before Monday night

Getting a player onto this ballot starts before the weekend ends. SI's editors build the nominee list from Friday and Saturday game results. A submission that reaches the Texas hub — player, school, position, full stat line, opponent, score — before Sunday morning gives the editors what they need while the ballot is still being assembled. A standout performance that no one flags can be missed in a market this large.

Once the ballot is live, the confirmed mechanic is unlimited voting. The October 2025 poll page said so directly: "you may cast as many votes as you'd like for each player." That means there is no ceiling imposed by the platform on any campaign's total. The practical ceiling is reach — how many real people in your network actually click the link and vote before Monday night.

The October 2025 field confirms what the strategic map looks like in practice. Galena Park ISD (North Shore and C.E. King) runs its own dense northeast Houston network — one ISD, two major programs, thousands of parents and alumni with a shared athletic identity. Humble ISD (Atascocita, Kingwood) is a parallel structure in the north suburbs: large in absolute numbers but anchored in different neighborhoods with different alumni chains than Galena Park. A Kingwood campaign cannot count on converting North Shore supporters, even though both schools are within the same general Houston orbit. Fort Bend Hightower draws from Fort Bend County's southwest growth corridor, another ISD entirely, with its own booster culture and county-level sports media.

The candidates from outside the metro — Curtland Woods of Bay City, JD Zurby of East Chambers, Cory Hosea of La Marque — operate through county sports accounts and community pages that the Greater Houston market never reaches. Those networks are not large by metro standards, but they are dense and centralized in a way that mass-market Houston channels are not. A Bay City campaign that activates the right Matagorda County networks before Monday night is not fighting the same battle as a Humble Kingwood campaign trying to organize across a sprawling suburban ISD. Both can win. Neither wins the same way.

Because the ballot is open, unlimited, and settled purely by who reaches more people before Monday's close, campaigns that exhaust personal networks have the option of structured vote promotion support designed for exactly this kind of recurring public fan poll.