North Carolina High School Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is HighSchoolOT Honors and how does the NC Player of the Year vote work?

HighSchoolOT Honors is North Carolina's only statewide annual awards programme dedicated exclusively to high school athletes and coaches across all NCHSAA classifications and sports. Produced by HighSchoolOT — the high school sports division of WRAL Sports Fan, a digital property of Capitol Broadcasting Company based in Raleigh — the programme has run annually since 2017 and now spans 36 award categories covering year-round athletics.

• The programme covers all NCHSAA classifications: 1A, 2A, 3A, and 4A — giving small rural programmes the same eligibility as large suburban and urban schools.
• Categories include male and female Athletes of the Year, seasonal (fall/winter/spring) sport-specific Players of the Year, coach awards, team awards, the Stuart Scott Courage Award (presented by Children's Advocacy Centers of NC), and a Scholar Athlete category.
• The 2025–26 cycle opened nominations through June 7, 2026, with fan voting running June 8–30, 2026, and winners announced during the first week of July 2026.
• High School on SI (Sports Illustrated) runs separate sport-specific NC POY fan polls during each sport's regular season — an independent second platform for statewide fan recognition.
• Both programmes are free to vote in; no account or subscription is required at either platform.

Who are past HighSchoolOT Honors Players of the Year in North Carolina?

The Male and Female Athlete of the Year categories are the headline POY awards within the Honors programme. Below are confirmed winners and notable award recipients drawn from publicly announced results across recent cycles. Fan-vote nominations determine who reaches the five-finalist ballot; committee staff weight the fan-vote total alongside editorial assessment when selecting the winner.

Recent Male and Female Athletes of the Year

POY categories by sport and season (2025–26)

How does voting for HighSchoolOT Honors work step by step?

The Honors programme runs a two-stage process — a nomination phase open to any North Carolina fan, followed by a structured fan-vote ballot among finalists. Neither stage requires an account, email registration, or payment at highschoolot.com.

1. Nomination phase: fans submit nominees through the Honors nominations page at highschoolot.com. The nomination form asks for the athlete's name, school, sport, and a performance description. HighSchoolOT staff review all nominations, and the five nominees with the most support in each category advance to the ballot.
2. Ballot phase: once nominations close, the five-finalist ballot for each of the 36 categories goes live at highschoolot.com. Any visitor can vote for their preferred finalist without registration or cost. The 2025–26 fan-vote window ran June 8–30, 2026.
3. Committee decision: HighSchoolOT staff members vote as a committee; the fan-vote total for each finalist counts as one additional committee vote. This hybrid model means heavy fan mobilisation can tip a close decision — but editorial judgement shapes the outcome.
4. Results: winners are announced category by category on highschoolot.com during the first week of July, with accompanying articles that detail the winner's season performance and credentials.

High School on SI operates differently: the Sports Illustrated high school platform publishes sport-specific NC POY fan polls throughout the regular season — typically 15-finalist ballots with no stated hourly cap — as standalone engagement polls separate from HighSchoolOT's annual honours cycle. Both platforms draw NC-wide audiences.

How do you build a winning vote total for North Carolina POY awards?

The nomination stage and the fan-vote stage both reward organised community mobilisation. Because the HighSchoolOT platform covers all 115 North Carolina counties and all NCHSAA classifications, the competitive field is genuinely statewide — a 2A school in Rockingham County competes on the same ballot as a 4A Wake County programme. For a full framework on how fan-vote campaigns work across online contests, see our guide to online contest voting; the notes below are specific to the NC statewide format.

Two patterns consistently produce outsized results in statewide NC awards. First, small 2A and 3A communities — where county identity is intense and local news coverage of an Honors nomination is itself a story — generate proportionally higher vote totals than larger metro programmes with more diffuse social networks. Second, cross-sport athletes (quarterback who also runs track, or basketball guard who plays soccer) draw from multiple booster communities simultaneously, giving them a structural vote advantage over single-sport nominees.

When a family or booster club has tapped every organic network and a finalist is still trailing, some entrants use a paid vote promotion service to reach additional real voters. If you go that route, use a service that delivers paced, genuine votes — rapid-fire submissions that look like bot traffic get flagged and removed. Our sports fan poll votes service is built around legitimate, paced delivery for exactly this kind of multi-finalist ballot.

What are the rules — and can you buy votes for HighSchoolOT Honors?

HighSchoolOT Honors is a reader-engagement awards programme with no cash prizes or formal sweepstakes structure under North Carolina state law. The relevant constraints are the platform's own technical terms and the hybrid committee-plus-fan-vote decision model.

There is a meaningful distinction worth understanding before acting:

• Automated scripts or bots — tools that generate artificial submission patterns without real human engagement. These produce detectable traffic signatures, violate standard platform terms, and result in vote removal.
• Paid promotion to real voters — reaching genuine people who choose to cast their own vote on the platform. This is structurally the same as a booster parent emailing 500 additional families, except the channel is different. Whether this satisfies the spirit of any specific contest's terms is a personal judgement each entrant must make after reading the current Honors page.

Because the Honors outcome involves editorial staff judgement — not a pure fan-vote count — the margin that fan-vote mobilisation can deliver is bounded. The practical risk in this format is reputational (a community noticing an unusual vote spike) rather than legal. Athletes, families, and boosters should weigh that reality honestly.

NC high school sports season calendar and when POY voting is most active

North Carolina's NCHSAA calendar drives both the sport-specific POY polls on High School on SI and the seasonal award windows within HighSchoolOT Honors. Understanding where a given sport falls on the calendar helps supporters know when to nominate and when to vote.

The June Elite Awards fan-vote window is the highest-traffic, most competitive moment in the entire HighSchoolOT Honors cycle — all 36 categories are live simultaneously, drawing attention from communities across all 115 NC counties. Supporters who activate their networks early in this window, rather than scrambling in the final 48 hours, consistently produce better outcomes.

For broader context on North Carolina prep sports recognition and how these programmes fit the statewide landscape, visit our North Carolina contest hub, the USA contest guide index, or explore how to run an effective fan-vote campaign.