Iowa Class 4A Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Iowa Class 4A Football Player of the Year poll?

The Iowa Class 4A Football Player of the Year is an annual fan-vote award published by High School on SI (Sports Illustrated / formerly SBLive) at si.com/high-school/iowa. It runs each November after the IHSAA state championship games at UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls and covers Class 4A specifically — Iowa's second-largest enrollment tier, comprising schools that fall below the 5A cutoff but above Class 3A.

Class 4A is the competitive tier where smaller cities outside the Des Moines metro — Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls, Dubuque, Pella, Sioux City — meet programmes from fast-growing suburbs and rural communities. It is also the classification that Dowling Catholic vacated on its way to Class 5A dominance, leaving a more open landscape for contenders like North Polk, Pella, and Cedar Rapids Xavier.

Class 4A football's defining programmes and history

Iowa Class 4A football history carries a sharp inflection point: the era before and after Dowling Catholic reclassified from what was effectively a dominant 4A programme into Class 5A. In the 2013-2019 window, Dowling Catholic won seven consecutive Iowa big-school titles. When they moved up, the 4A field opened — and what emerged was a more distributed championship landscape with programmes from across the state competing for the title.

North Polk's 2024 championship was a watershed moment for the Alleman-based programme — a school that had reached the final twice in a row before breaking through. Pella's consecutive runner-up finishes (2023 and 2024) signal a programme in sustained contention. Cedar Rapids Xavier's 2025 unbeaten title season, meanwhile, demonstrates that east-Iowa Catholic schools remain serious 4A forces even as the CIML metro schools push downward in classification.

Class 4A geography and programme spread

Unlike Class 5A, which is heavily concentrated in the Des Moines metro corridor, Class 4A draws from a much wider geographic spread: north-central Iowa (North Polk), south-central Iowa (Pella), east Iowa (Cedar Rapids Xavier, Western Dubuque), northeast Iowa (Cedar Falls border), northwest Iowa (Sioux City East), and southwest Iowa programmes. This geographic spread is also the voter-mobilisation landscape — a tight-knit programme like North Polk in a small community can generate remarkable per-capita engagement, as rural Iowa demonstrated with 3A Humboldt's Coen Matson winning the 2024 overall Iowa POY with 64.71 percent of all-class votes.

2024 Class 4A Football Player of the Year nominees

The 2024 High School on SI Class 4A Football Player of the Year poll ran with a November 30 closing date. The 2024 season produced standout individual performers across multiple positions, with the ballot headlined by two confirmed nominees whose production ranked among the best across all Iowa classes.

Will Hawthorne's 2,263 rushing yards in 2024 was not just the top Class 4A figure — it led all seven Iowa IHSAA classifications, meaning the best ground-game season in the entire state came from a Class 4A back. His 28 touchdowns also ranked among the highest multi-class totals that season. His school was not confirmed in published search results, but the production is a matter of record.

How to vote in the Iowa Class 4A Football Player of the Year poll

Voting in the Class 4A football POY poll follows the same mechanics as all High School on SI Iowa polls. The specific 2024 article is at si.com/high-school/iowa/vote-who-should-be-the-iowa-class-4a-football-player-of-the-year-01jd08vt18zj. Each new season generates a new article URL; always navigate from si.com/high-school/iowa to find the current poll rather than bookmarking a prior-year link.

The embedded widget lists each finalist with a brief performance note. Clicking a name submits a vote — no account, no email, no captcha. Live totals display within the widget and update periodically, allowing supporters to monitor competitive gaps in real time. There is no per-hour vote restriction published for this format, unlike the weekly Athlete of the Week contest on the same platform.

Maximising votes for a Class 4A football Player of the Year candidate

Class 4A sits in an interesting competitive middle ground for fan-poll campaigns. Unlike Class 5A where CIML booster organisations have institutional scale, and unlike Class 3A where small-town community density creates per-capita voting power, Class 4A spans both ends — programmes like North Polk (small community, high cohesion) and Cedar Falls (mid-city, institutional booster structure) require different mobilisation approaches.

Outreach tactics matched to Class 4A school types

When organic reach has been fully deployed and a competitive gap persists, vote-promotion services provide a supplementary channel. For details on how cap-matched, real-voter delivery works in embedded poll formats, see the sports fan poll votes service. For the broader framework of online contest voting, the contest voting guide covers this format type in full. For a wider view of Iowa contests, the Iowa hub and USA contest index map additional voting opportunities across the state.