Every Christmas week, The Vicksburg Post All-Area team honors the best of the gridiron.

We award a defensive player of the year, an offensive player and a coach. It’s a process that few are aware of. But there is a process.

Every year, we get calls “Why didn’t player XYZ make the team?”

That’s a good question. Hope this answer helps.

The process to build the team starts with our annual sports department meeting. We decide on the individual awards first. The toughest process is when there are a ton of deserving candidates and you have to pick one. Sometimes, we have to pick two, like we’ve done in baseball and basketball, but that’s not a preferred scenario.

It’s easy to believe that looking at stats alone would decide the offensive player, but we try to compute other factors, like the win-loss record, into the equation as well. I think a day will come if we have a dominant men-among-boys-type lineman to make one player of the year.

For defensive player, we want the guy that opposing offenses had to game plan around. Who makes the big sack or the big takeaway in crunch time? It’s not just a leading tackler award. It’s an impact award.

Coach of the year is a little more difficult, especially if all our teams do well or poorly. Out of all of the awards we give out, that one can be the toughest to pick.

As for the team, we evaluate everything, from our vantage point covering the games to stats and coaches’ recommendations, which count for a lot. The first thing at the end of the season we ask is “Who deserves to be on the all-area team?” When it comes to linemen, especially defensive linemen who occupy blockers and who usually don’t show up statistically, we depend heavily on the coaches to point us in the right direction.

We try to hold down the numbers to around 12 or 13 players on offense and defense. Since we don’t cover that many schools (four in the county and five in the area) and just about every decent player would deserve inclusion in a second team or an honorable mention, we don’t go that route. We want this to mean something, not just be a silly participation award.

The toughest part of putting together the team is finding a place for players, especially when we have several deserving candidates at one position. Often, if that player took snaps and excelled elsewhere, we’ll put them there instead. Imagine it as a gigantic puzzle and we try to fit the pieces where we can, within reason.

That’s why you’ll see a player more well known as a running back on our team as a defensive back or even as a return man. We will have a few athlete/multipurpose slots to accommodate guys who don’t really fit on the team elsewhere.

Inevitably, a numbers crunch, not a vendetta, is why a guy will slip through the cracks. We hate that it happens, but often, we have to choose two out of three candidates and one will get left out.

I hope you’re looking forward to the all-area team as much as we are bringing it to you.

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Steve Wilson is sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. You can follow him on Twitter at vpsportseditor. He can be reached at 601-636-4545, ext. 142 or at swilson@vicksburgpost.com.