New Jersey High School Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the New Jersey High School Player of the Year on High School on SI?

The New Jersey High School Player of the Year is not a single trophy — it is a family of annual, sport-specific fan-vote polls published by High School on SI, Sports Illustrated's prep sports vertical (formerly SBLive Sports, rebranded after SI's parent Arena Group acquired the platform in 2022). Each poll lives inside a dedicated article at si.com/high-school/new-jersey and opens after the NJSIAA season it covers has concluded.

• Separate end-of-season polls run for football offensive Player of the Year, football defensive Player of the Year, boys basketball, girls basketball, and other sports as the editorial calendar allows.
• Nominations are made by the High School on SI New Jersey editorial staff — primarily based on submitted performance stats, coach reports, and season rankings — not by public nomination.
• Voting is completely free and unlimited: no account, no cap, and no registration required. Any visitor can vote repeatedly until 11:59 p.m. Eastern on the closing date shown in the article.
• Coverage extends across all NJSIAA-member schools statewide — from small Group 1 programmes in Sussex County to Non-Public A powerhouses in Bergen and Hudson counties.
• The series is distinct from NJ.com's editorial Player of the Year awards (selected by NJ Advance Media reporters, not fan votes) — the SI polls are purely fan-driven recognition with no editorial override of the outcome.

Which New Jersey schools and conferences feed the Player of the Year ballot?

High School on SI covers all NJSIAA-member programmes statewide, but end-of-season POY ballots skew heavily toward schools with the deepest statistical performances — which, in New Jersey, means the Non-Public A tier in Bergen and Hudson counties and the large Group 4 and Group 5 public schools in the Shore Conference, Super Essex Conference, and Big North Conference tend to dominate nominations.

The Non-Public A tier — Bergen Catholic, Don Bosco Prep, St. Joseph Montvale, St. Peter's Prep, and Seton Hall Prep — concentrates the most athletically recruited rosters in the state. These schools also have the largest alumni networks and booster organisations capable of mobilising votes quickly when a POY poll goes live.

The public-school bracket produces strong nominees particularly in football (Shore Conference, Big North) and basketball (Super Essex Conference, BCSL). Prep schools such as Blair Academy and Rutgers Preparatory School compete under NJIPHSAA rather than NJSIAA classifications, but their athletes regularly appear on SI New Jersey nomination lists — notably Deron Rippey Jr. of Blair Academy, who won the New Jersey Gatorade Boys Basketball Player of the Year in both the 2024–25 and 2025–26 seasons.

How does voting for the New Jersey High School Player of the Year work?

Each POY poll is embedded directly inside a sport-specific article at si.com/high-school/new-jersey. The article identifies the nominees — typically eight to fifteen athletes — with a paragraph of season context for each. The poll widget appears within the same page; clicking a name and submitting the form casts a vote. No login, email, or account is required at any step.

Unlike weekly Player of the Week polls, the annual POY polls carry no hourly reset or per-vote cap. A single visitor can vote repeatedly from the same browser session, and the counter advances on each submission. This mechanic means total vote counts on well-supported POY polls can reach tens of thousands within a multi-day window — substantially higher than the typical weekly poll totals. For a broader explanation of how unlimited-cap online fan polls function, see our complete online voting guide.

Nominations are submitted to the High School on SI New Jersey editorial team by email (contact [email protected]) or by tagging @HighSchoolonSI on social media. The editors, not the public, build the ballot from submitted stats and season performance. Once the poll article is published and the closing date announced, voting opens immediately and remains live until exactly 11:59 p.m. Eastern on that date.

2024 New Jersey Football Player of the Year: nominees and context

The 2024 season saw High School on SI New Jersey run separate fan-vote polls for Offensive Player of the Year (13 nominees, voting closed December 20, 2024) and Defensive Player of the Year (14 nominees, voting closed December 24, 2024). These are among the most competitive POY ballots in the state's prep sports calendar.

2024 Offensive POY — selected nominees

2024 Defensive POY — selected nominees

The 2024 football POY cycle illustrates how the non-public private schools and large Group 4/5 public programmes split the nominations roughly evenly. Voters behind large programmes like Toms River North — a Shore Conference powerhouse with a broad Ocean County fan base — can mobilise quickly across community networks, while the Bergen County private schools (Bergen Catholic, Don Bosco, St. Joseph Montvale) rely on alumni networks and organised booster clubs stretching back decades.

POY by sport and season: how the annual cycle maps onto the NJSIAA calendar

New Jersey runs three NJSIAA sports seasons — fall, winter, spring — and High School on SI publishes POY polls after the close of each season. The table below maps the programme to the real New Jersey prep sports calendar.

The most competitive POY votes in the New Jersey calendar are the football end-of-season polls in November–December, when Bergen County private school alumni networks and Shore Conference communities both mobilise at peak intensity.

Basketball POY polls attract the second-highest engagement. The Gatorade Player of the Year (a separate, editorial award sponsored by Gatorade with a national programme) provides additional context about which athletes are drawing the most recognition in a given season — for instance, Blair Academy's Deron Rippey Jr. becoming New Jersey's repeat Gatorade Boys Basketball Player of the Year in 2024–25 and 2025–26 signals the dominant figure in that year's basketball POY conversation at High School on SI as well.

How to get more votes for a New Jersey Player of the Year nominee

Because the NJ High School on SI POY polls carry no per-vote cap, the campaign ceiling is determined entirely by supporter reach and activation speed — not by device count or hourly resets. The core move is identical to any unlimited-cap poll: get the direct article link in front of every realistic network within minutes of the poll going live, not hours later. For the underlying mechanics of unlimited-cap fan polls, see our voting guides and the full online voting overview.

The single highest-impact action for any NJ POY campaign is mobilising a school's alumni network within the first two hours the poll is live — early leads suppress competitor engagement because casual voters gravitate toward whoever appears to be winning when they arrive. For private schools with decades of graduates active on social media, this initial surge can be decisive.

Rules, fairness, and the buy-votes question for New Jersey POY polls

High School on SI's fan-vote polls are reader-engagement features with no cash prize and no formal New Jersey prize-promotion law framework — the NJSIAA does not administer these awards and the outcome carries no formal classification consequences. The relevant constraints come from the poll platform's own terms. For a balanced, full-length treatment of legality across all online fan polls, see our buy-votes guide; the section below covers what is specific to this programme.

Two distinct activities are worth separating clearly:

• Automated scripts and bots that send machine-generated requests at high velocity from single fingerprints — these risk detection and vote removal, and violate standard platform terms regardless of whether a cap exists.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people who visit the article and vote from their own devices. This is structurally the same as a booster club email reaching additional community members, and the result is genuine fan engagement on the platform.

Whether that distinction satisfies the spirit of any particular poll terms is a judgement each entrant makes after reading the current official article. In this format — a fan-recognition poll with no prize, no NJSIAA official standing, and no account ban mechanism — the practical risk of aggressive vote-buying is reputational rather than legal or regulatory. The athlete faces no NJSIAA eligibility consequence; the family faces no legal risk. Weigh those realities honestly against the recognition value at stake.

Note that the separately managed NJ.com editorial Player of the Year awards involve no fan vote and cannot be influenced through any voting campaign — NJ Advance Media reporters make those selections entirely independently.

For New Jersey-specific context on how online voting competitions work across the state — from school elections to mascot contests — see the New Jersey contest hub.