Michigan High School Volleyball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the State Champs! Michigan High School Volleyball Player of the Year?

The Michigan High School Volleyball Player of the Year is an annual statewide award run by State Champs! Sports Network in partnership with Michigan Elite Volleyball, a Michigan-focused club and prep volleyball development organisation. It covers girls varsity volleyball across all four MHSAA competitive divisions — Division 1 through Division 4 — drawing candidates from the more than 400 schools that field active varsity programmes in the state each fall.

• Hosted at statechampsnetwork.com, Michigan's dedicated prep sports news and awards platform.
• Online fan voting opens during the fall season and closes around early-to-mid November, with the live winner announcement timed to MHSAA Volleyball Finals week at Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek.
• Voters may cast up to 100 votes every seven days after registering an email address.
• The online fan vote contributes 20% of the total selection criteria; the remaining 80% derives from season performance, competition level, big-game results, team success, and recruiting standing.
• The 2024 winner was Ella Craggs, a standout Michigan volleyball prospect; the 2025 award continued the State Champs! / Michigan Elite Volleyball partnership.
• The award is distinct from the Michigan Volleyball Coaches Association (MVCA) All-State programme, which is a coaches-only selection with no public vote component.

A State Champs! Volleyball Player of the Year listing is a publicly searchable, credentialed statewide accolade — meaningful for college programme timelines since high-major volleyball recruiting peaks in a player's sophomore and junior fall seasons.

Which Michigan schools and regions produce the most volleyball POY contenders?

Michigan volleyball powerhouses are concentrated in the Detroit-area suburbs (Oakland, Macomb, and Washtenaw counties), the Kalamazoo–Battle Creek corridor in southwest Michigan, and the Grand Rapids metro in West Michigan. The table below lists schools that have appeared in MHSAA Volleyball Finals or State Champs! award discussions across all four divisions in recent seasons.

The Oakland Activities Association (OAA) — covering Lake Orion, Clarkston, Rochester Adams, Oxford, and other large Oakland County programmes — is Michigan's most competitive Division 1 volleyball conference, regularly sending multiple finalists to the MHSAA state tournament. The Detroit Catholic League features Bloomfield Hills Marian, a programme that has combined consistent regular-season strength with Finals appearances over multiple decades. In southwest Michigan, Portage Central in the SMAC conference has been a perennial contender for D1 honours.

West Michigan (Kent County and surrounding area) contributes programmes from the OK White and OK Red conferences, with Forest Hills Central and Caledonia regularly represented at the Finals. Small-school excellence surfaces in Division 4 through mid-Michigan Catholic programmes like Pewamo-Westphalia and Thumb-region schools such as Ubly — programmes whose tight community networks mobilise effectively for both Finals runs and online award votes.

How does State Champs! Michigan Volleyball Player of the Year voting work?

The vote lives at statechampsnetwork.com and is free — but unlike anonymous newspaper-style polls, it requires an email address to register. Each account holder can submit up to 100 votes per seven-day rolling period for their preferred candidate. There is no stated cap on the number of separate registered accounts that different individual supporters can create, so coordinated fan networks — team parents, club volleyball families, school booster organisations — can build substantial totals across a multi-week window when each person registers and votes.

Live standings are visible on the award page throughout the voting period, showing cumulative vote totals for each nominee. The voting window typically runs several weeks through October and early November, closing a few days before the MHSAA Volleyball Finals. The exact close date and time are posted on the current award page at statechampsnetwork.com each season.

How does the online vote translate into the final award?

The online vote leader at the close of the fan-vote phase is automatically placed in a Final Four of candidates — one guaranteed finalist position for the voter-poll leader, plus three editorial selections from the State Champs! and Michigan Elite Volleyball panel. From there, the full weighted six-criteria model is applied to select the overall winner. Leading the online vote secures a Finals berth; it does not guarantee the overall award. For a plain-English overview of weighted fan-vote award mechanics, visit our online contest voting guide.

What is the full scoring model — and how is the winner decided?

The Michigan High School Volleyball Player of the Year is selected through a six-category weighted model published by State Champs! each season. Fan voting carries meaningful weight, but performance and editorial criteria together hold 80% of the total score. The table below shows each criterion and its weight.

Once the Final Four is set, the State Champs! editorial team — working alongside Michigan Elite Volleyball — scores each candidate across all six criteria and selects the overall winner. The live announcement is made at Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek during MHSAA Volleyball Finals week each November — in front of the state's top programmes and their travel contingents.

The Michigan Volleyball Coaches Association (MVCA) also publishes separate annual All-State recognition through a coaches-vote process with no public fan-vote component. These two tracks are independent — a player can earn both State Champs! Player of the Year and MVCA All-State recognition in the same season.

How do you build votes for a Michigan volleyball POY candidate?

Volleyball fan networks in Michigan differ structurally from football or basketball fan bases: club volleyball families — connected through Michigan Elite Volleyball, VCM Volleyball, Great Lakes Volleyball Club, and USAV Great Lakes region affiliates — often extend across county lines and into bordering states through multi-year travel-ball relationships. That cross-county reach makes club volleyball among the most effective single channels for vote mobilisation in a statewide Michigan award.

• Club team networks first. A varsity player at a top Oakland or Washtenaw County school may have 40 to 60 current and former club teammates across multiple club organisations — each of whom can register and vote independently. A post to a club team group chat reaches a pre-qualified audience that already knows the player's ability.
• Varsity roster and school community. A 12–15 player varsity squad plus parent contacts represents 25–30 registered voters, each worth up to 100 votes per week. A full booster club email to the school parent list — framing the award as a whole-community recognition — multiplies that base substantially.
• MHSAA district and regional week timing. Fan engagement peaks when a player's team is still alive in the MHSAA tournament. Post the voting link during the district or regional week — when school community attention is highest and local sports coverage amplifies reach.
• Social media posts naming the player, school, division, and direct link. Posts that specify "Vote for [Name] — [School] — State Champs! Michigan Volleyball Player of the Year — voting closes [date]" outperform vague "show your support" calls to action by removing every decision step from the reader.
• Local sports media and prep volleyball coverage outlets. Regional prep media covering Oakland, Kent, or Kalamazoo County volleyball will sometimes amplify the voting link when a local player is in contention — flag the nomination to reporters covering your district or regional tournament.

When every organic channel has been mobilised and a significant gap to the lead persists, some families and booster groups turn to paid vote promotion. If you pursue that route, use a service delivering paced, genuine human votes within the seven-day cap — the statechampsnetwork.com platform tracks registration patterns, and artificially spiked totals from bot accounts can be removed. Our sports fan poll votes service is designed for exactly this type of email-registered, weekly-reset award format. For broader vote-building strategy, the how-to guide covers the complete framework.

What are the rules — and can you buy votes for this award?

State Champs! requires email registration per voter, creating an auditable record that distinguishes it from anonymous IP-only polls. The award prohibits automated scripts or programmatically generated accounts inflating totals artificially. The practical distinction that matters for supporters — identical to how it works in the softball and football counterpart awards on the same platform — is between two clearly different types of activity:

• Bot-generated or scripted votes — automated registrations using fake email identities or rapid-fire injections that circumvent the seven-day reset. These violate platform terms, produce detectable traffic anomalies, and are removed when flagged by the moderation team.
• Real human voter outreach — legitimate supporters, reached through a paid channel, who register genuine email accounts and vote within the seven-day cap. Structurally identical to a well-executed booster club email campaign that brought in 200 new registered voters — the mechanics are the same, only the acquisition channel differs.

Because this award carries a live championship-week ceremony at Kellogg Arena — with statewide media coverage from State Champs!, Michigan Elite Volleyball, and local prep sports outlets — the reputational stakes of any controversy around the vote are meaningfully higher than for a weekly local newspaper poll. Coaches, families, and supporters should weigh that context carefully. For a balanced explainer on the legal and ethical landscape across different contest formats, see our full vote-buying guide.

Michigan volleyball POY season timeline — fall calendar from tryouts to Kellogg Arena

The Michigan High School Volleyball Player of the Year award runs on the MHSAA fall sports calendar. Volleyball is a fall sport in Michigan — one of the state's three major fall offerings alongside football and cross-country. The table below maps the key stages from preseason through the Finals-week live announcement.

Michigan's fall volleyball season runs roughly 12 weeks from first matches in late August through the Kellogg Arena Finals in mid-November. The compressed timeline — shaped by Michigan's academic calendar and the shared fall sports schedule with football — means meaningful competitive data accumulates quickly and the fan voting window rarely exceeds four to five weeks.

Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek is a 6,200-seat multipurpose venue that has hosted the MHSAA Volleyball Finals continuously since 1990, giving the Michigan state volleyball championship one of the most recognisable and consistent home venues of any state volleyball programme in the Midwest. The Player of the Year announcement at this venue — in front of families, coaches, and players from all four MHSAA divisions — adds a public credential dimension that a purely online award lacks.

For additional Michigan fan-vote contests and award guides, visit the Michigan contest hub. For a full index of US high school sports award votes, explore the USA contest guide. If you are ready to discuss vote promotion strategy for this award, our buy-votes guide covers the complete landscape.