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

What is the Mr. PA Football Player of the Year award?

Mr. PA Football is an independent annual awards programme — now in its 15th year — that names Pennsylvania's top high school football player each spring at a formal banquet in Hershey. Unlike a weekly newsroom poll, this is a season-long elimination process that takes the best performers from across all twelve PIAA districts and all six classifications and runs them through public voting rounds that span January through early March.

• Two separate awards — Big School (Classes 4A, 5A, 6A) and Small School (Classes 1A, 2A, 3A) — so elite talent at a 1A programme competes on an equal platform to a 6A powerhouse.
• The fan vote at mrpafootball.com counts as one-third of the final score; the statewide coaches panel contributes one-third; an assembled media jury supplies the final third.
• Fans may cast one vote per day per award category — unlike an hourly-cap newspaper poll, daily discipline and duration matter more than burst volume.
• The 15th annual awards ceremony was held in 2025, confirming the programme has run continuously since approximately 2010.
• Weekly in-season awards (Player of the Week, Team of the Week) run alongside at mrpafootball.com throughout the September–November season, using a separate daily fan vote.

Recent Mr. PA Football winners — Big School and Small School

The table below compiles confirmed Big School and Small School winners drawn from public records and coverage by EasternPAFootball.com, High School Football America, and the mrpafootball.com awards archive. These are the publicly confirmed winners through 2024; the 2025 season winner will be announced at the spring 2026 banquet.

The winners table reveals a consistent pattern: PIAA District 3 (Harrisburg/south-central PA) and District 12 (Philadelphia metro) produce the most Big School finalists, while western PA small-school programmes — Aliquippa, Steelton-Highspire, Central Valley — consistently dominate the 1A–3A bracket. Nicholas Singleton's 2021 Big School win from Governor Mifflin, followed by a Penn State commitment, is emblematic of the award's national recruiting signal — his name remains among the most-cited Mr. PA Football alumni.

How does the Mr. PA Football fan vote work?

The fan vote at mrpafootball.com is a structured multi-round ballot, not a single open poll. Each round narrows the field, and the fan-vote tally from each round — combined with the coaches and media scores — determines which nominees advance. Understanding the round structure is essential for anyone organising a support campaign.

Round structure and daily vote mechanic

Mr. PA Football releases nominees at the start of the annual voting window (typically January) and runs the field through elimination rounds until a winner is confirmed ahead of the spring banquet. Fans vote at mrpafootball.com — one vote per person per day per award category (Big School and Small School are separate ballots). There is no hourly reset; the daily cap means a consistent, daily-reminder campaign over the full multi-week window produces more fan-vote points than a single-day surge.

The platform requires no account to vote during the annual award window. Weekly in-season awards (Player of the Week, Team of the Week) run on the same mrpafootball.com platform during September–November with the same one-vote-per-day mechanic — those are separate from the annual POY ballot. For a broader primer on how online contest voting mechanics work, see our guide to contest voting.

Which Pennsylvania schools and PIAA districts produce the most POY contenders?

Finalists and winners cluster around a handful of districts and school types. Knowing the competitive landscape helps a campaign team understand what fan-vote total they need to be competitive in any given year.

Philadelphia's Catholic League schools — St. Joseph's Prep, La Salle, Archbishop Carroll — have enormous alumni networks that mobilise effectively for annual awards. St. Joseph's Prep alone has produced multiple Big School finalists; Kyle McCord's 2020 win from there underscores that reach. Western PA small-school programmes carry passionate, tightly bonded communities: Aliquippa boosters are widely regarded as among the most organised in the state for any online campaign.

District 3's south-central corridor is the strongest single source of Big School quarterbacks — Bishop McDevitt (Stone Saunders, 2022; Beau Pribula), Governor Mifflin (Nicholas Singleton, 2021), and Central York have each placed nominees or winners in recent cycles. The Harrisburg-area fan base is large and digitally active, routinely producing some of the highest fan-vote totals in any given round.

How do you build fan votes for a Mr. PA Football nomination?

Winning the fan-vote third of the Mr. PA Football tally requires disciplined daily outreach across a multi-week window — a fundamentally different campaign from a 48-hour newspaper poll sprint. The daily cap means you need consistent participation from a wide network, not a single-day mobilisation. Full tactical depth on running an online vote campaign is covered in our contest voting guide and our how-to section; the PA-specific notes below focus on what works inside this particular award's structure.

The most effective Pennsylvania-specific channel is school community infrastructure. Bishop McDevitt, St. Joseph's Prep, and Aliquippa have booster clubs with email lists numbering in the hundreds — a single morning send from a well-connected booster parent can generate hundreds of daily votes before 9 a.m. The Lehigh Valley region (Northwestern Lehigh, Nazareth, Emmaus) has strong local sports-media amplification through EasternPAFootball.com and the Morning Call, which can organically drive vote awareness.

When organic outreach has been exhausted and the nominee is trailing in the fan-vote standings, some campaign teams supplement with paid real-voter promotion. For this type of multi-week daily-cap poll, paced delivery matched to the one-vote-per-day rhythm matters — see our sports fan poll service for details on how cap-matched pacing works in practice.

What are the Mr. PA Football rules, and can you buy votes?

Mr. PA Football's Selection and Rules page at mrpafootball.com spells out the tri-partite structure: fans, coaches, and media each count for one-third. The fan-vote component is a public poll with a one-vote-per-day-per-person limit. The programme's rules are primarily aimed at ensuring that no single voter can cast an unlimited number of votes in a short window — the daily cap is the main technical control.

The buy-votes question for this award breaks down the same way it does for other online fan polls — a meaningful distinction exists between two categories of activity:

• Automated bot scripts that attempt to submit hundreds of votes per day from the same device or IP block — these are what the daily cap is designed to stop, and they produce detectable traffic patterns that lead to vote removal.
• Paid outreach to real human voters who each cast one vote per day within the cap — structurally identical to a booster club email reaching five hundred extra families. Each person is voting once a day, as permitted.

Whether paid real-voter promotion satisfies the spirit of a particular award's rules is a judgement each campaign team must make after reading the current official terms. The stakes here are higher than a weekly newspaper poll — Mr. PA Football is a recognised annual award with coaching and media scores involved, and a reputation for integrity across the PIAA community. Weigh that context honestly. For a broader, neutral discussion of the legality and ethics of contest vote promotion, our full guide covers the landscape across poll types.

When does Mr. PA Football voting open and close each year?

The annual award follows a predictable Pennsylvania high school football calendar anchored to the PIAA season and the spring banquet date in Hershey.

The exact voting-close date shifts by a few days each year depending on banquet scheduling. The 2024 cycle closed approximately March 1, 2025, with the banquet on March 22, 2025. Always confirm the precise close date on the active ballot page at mrpafootball.com — it is displayed on the voting widget itself.

Pennsylvania's statewide contest-voting ecosystem also includes the SI High School weekly athlete poll and various district-level media polls; the Mr. PA Football POY is the only annual award with a published tri-partite scoring structure covering the entire state. For all Pennsylvania online-voting contests, visit our Pennsylvania hub. For the full US contest guide index, see USA contest guides.