Suffolk’s public schools may not start the school year until Tuesday, but many of their fall sports teams have already seen action. For the city’s private schools, football, field hockey and volleyball teams are generally well into their seasons.

This is an exciting time of year for anybody who loves high school sports. Old rivalries are renewed, new ones begin to take shape, college sports dreams begin to come into focus and fans are treated to all the spectacle and excitement that high school sports can offer.

Last year at the Suffolk News-Herald, we got pretty excited ourselves about school sports, adding a Player of the Week poll to the mix of our regular coverage. Our readers — if I can be forgiven for the pun — took the ball and ran with it, making the poll one of the most popular features in our paper and on our website.

We’ve brought the poll back this year with the help of Duke Automotive, and this year it’s going to be even better.

As with last year, we’ll be featuring the nominees on Sunday’s sports page. Voting opens Sunday night and continues until 7 p.m. Wednesday on our website, www.suffolknewsherald.com, on Facebook and by email to sports@suffolknewsherald.com. After we tally the votes, we’ll announce the winner in a special write-up appearing in the following Sunday’s edition.

We received thousands of votes for Player of the Week last year, so we’ve increased our capacity this year and thrown a couple of new things into the mix. Folks who vote on our website will see a neat graphic showing the standings there, and we’re working on a way to show the cumulative wins for each school.

The new polling system has a built-in mechanism to foil non-human entries, so there should be no more concerns about enterprising future computer-science majors finding a way to spoof the system with thousands of automated votes per player. We’ll be keeping an eye on things, too, and if it looks as if there’s a problem we’ll tweak things to keep everybody honest.

We’re very excited about the Duke Automotive-Suffolk News-Herald Player of the Week, and we hope you will be, too.

Now, who’s got school spirit?