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

Richland Springs and North Shore on the same ballot

Richland Springs fields one of the smallest football programs in Texas. The Coyotes play 6-man football, a format built for schools too small for the standard eleven-man game. North Shore, in Houston's Harris County, is a perennial 6A heavyweight that has sent players to major college programs for years. On December 22, 2025, Ethan Deeds of Richland Springs and Tony Guillory of North Shore were on the same statewide Defensive Player of the Week ballot.

That is the structural fact that defines this poll more than any other. The SI / SBLive Texas Defensive Player of the Week draws from the full UIL ladder — 6A through 1A, including 6-man — and from TAPPS private schools as well. Thirteen other programs filled out that December 22 field, from the C.E. King Panthers in Houston to the Wall Hawks, the Gordon Longhorns, and the Muenster Hornets, schools whose entire communities could fit inside North Shore's stadium. A 6-man sophomore's 9 tackles can appear directly above a 6A defensive end's sack on the same voter's screen.

Most voters arriving at this ballot expect a familiar set of Texas powerhouse names. What they find instead is a geographic and enrollment cross-section that makes this poll harder to predict than the statewide offensive ballot. A community that turns out completely — every alum, every parent, every teacher — at 100% can out-vote a community five times its size at 10%. That gap does not close itself.

What the confirmed winners reveal about the field

Four confirmed fall 2025 winners — Phillip Smith of Smithson Valley, Cam Pettijohn of Prestonwood Christian, Derrick Wolford of Yates, and Robbie Ladd of Southlake Carroll — are worth reading as a set rather than as four unrelated names.

Smithson Valley is a UIL 6A program in Comal County, northwest of San Antonio. Southlake Carroll operates in the DFW suburbs with one of the most recognizable brands in Texas prep football. Both carry large, organized alumni bases. Yates is a Houston ISD program in the Third Ward with a deep identity rooted in Houston's African American community — a different kind of concentrated social network. Prestonwood Christian is a TAPPS private school in North Dallas whose families represent exactly the kind of tightly connected parent-driven community that closes a ballot fast when it mobilizes.

None of these four programs won on raw enrollment size. The pattern across them is that each represents a community that routed the poll link to a network small enough to move together. Smithson Valley's Comal County base, Prestonwood's parent network, Yates's Third Ward alumni, Southlake's suburban booster operation — four different social topologies, same mechanism. The week a program from Hamilton or Muenster wins on this ballot, it will read exactly the same way.

The Sunday close, and how it differs from the Dallas regional

Both the statewide Texas offensive and defensive polls close Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The four SI regional polls — Dallas / North Texas, Houston, San Antonio, East Texas — each close Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That one-day gap changes the campaign calendar entirely.

The defensive ballot's Sunday close means a campaign that waits until Saturday to start has two days to move votes. The Dallas regional gives three. Both polls are on the same platform and the vote cap language is the same, so a supporter who voted on the statewide ballot Sunday night cannot follow up on the Dallas regional until the next week's ballot opens — they are different polls, independent races.

More Texas football contests and their mechanics are documented at /usa/texas/; the national directory of weekly fan-vote polls lives at /usa/.

Getting a player nominated, and running the campaign once the ballot is live

Nomination comes before voting matters. SI's Texas editorial staff assemble the defensive ballot from Friday and Saturday night results — 15 nominees on the championship-week field means they are casting a wide net, but a strong performance that goes unflagged can still be missed. The contact for nominations is Bob Lundeberg at bob.lundeberg@gmail.com; a submission that arrives Saturday night with the player's name, school, position, tackle total, TFLs, sacks or turnovers, opponent, and score gives the editors what they need to make a decision before Sunday's ballot is set.

Once the ballot is live, the statewide scope creates a specific campaign challenge that the regional polls do not have: supporters are spread across the state, not concentrated in one metro. A Kilgore community campaigning for David McGowan is working from East Texas. A Hamilton family campaigning for Easton Marwitz is working from Hamilton County, well west of Waco. Neither of those communities is running into each other's social feeds naturally — which means the campaign stays inside its own network rather than benefiting from overlapping metro coverage the way a DFW nominee might.

The practical solution is to treat the poll link as something that needs to reach every layer of the school's extended community: current players, parents, teachers, former players now in college or working elsewhere in the state, and the town's broader social accounts. A defensive performance that earned a 15-nominee statewide field nod can hold its own against a North Shore or Smithson Valley, but only if the supporters who care about it find the ballot before Sunday night closes it. For campaigns that need to reach beyond their organic network, structured vote support is available for open, turnout-decided polls like this one. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence of fan-vote campaigns in more detail.