Vote for The Montgomery Advertiser's Girls Athlete of the Week presented by Vance Law Firm: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the Girls Athlete of the Week and why the poll exists

This is a readers' award before it is anything else. The Montgomery Advertiser, the daily newspaper serving Montgomery and the surrounding Alabama high school sports scene, picks a short list of female athletes whose performances stood out over the previous week of competition, then hands the decision to its audience. Vance Law Firm presents the poll, which is why the sponsor's name sits in the programme's full title. The ballot itself runs on Crowdsignal, the polling company that operates poll.fm, and any reader with the link can take part.

That community-first setup shapes who actually decides the winner. There is no judges' panel and no editorial pick at the point of decision: the athlete with the most supporter votes when the poll closes takes the weekly honours. In practice that means the vote is carried by the people closest to each nominee, family members, classmates, teammates and the wider school community, along with regular Advertiser sports readers who follow Montgomery area high school athletics.

Because the audience is local, the poll doubles as a weekly scoreboard for the area's girls sports programmes. A nomination on the ballot signals that a performance was among the best in the region that week, and the vote count shows which school communities turn out for their athletes. The table below gathers the programme's fixed details in one place.

The voting window and the years the series has run

The confirmed dates come from the publisher's own coverage. For the current cycle, voting opened on Sunday, Sept. 13 and runs through Thursday, Sept. 17, closing at noon. That Sunday-to-noon-Thursday pattern gives the poll roughly four days of open voting, a short window that rewards communities that mobilise early rather than waiting for the final hours.

The series is established rather than new. Confirmed editions of the Girls Athlete of the Week fan vote ran across 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, five straight years of weekly ballots anchored to the Montgomery Advertiser's high school sports coverage. A programme that has held its slot that long is a fixture of the paper's seasonal calendar, and each school year produces a fresh run of weekly polls.

Certain details never appear in the ballot text. The Advertiser does not publish a list of award categories beyond the weekly athlete vote, nor any statement about how frequently a single supporter may cast ballots, nor any eligibility text for participants; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Going forward the schedule works the same way. The publisher announces each week's nominees with the poll itself, and the opening date of the following ballot is not posted ahead of the current one; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The one dated anchor a supporter can count on is the printed closing line: noon on Thursday, Sept. 17 for this ballot.

How to vote on the poll.fm ballot right now

Voting takes place on the Crowdsignal page the Advertiser links to from its sports coverage. The live ballot is at poll.fm/16921787, and it is a plain radio-button poll: a list of nominated athletes, one selectable choice, and a submit button. There is no account to create and no separate nomination form for supporters, the publisher compiles the nominee list from its own reporting before the poll opens.

The sequence a supporter follows is short. Open the ballot, read the nominee summaries describing each athlete's week, select one name, and submit. The page logs the choice right away. Because the window closes at noon on Thursday, the practical advice is to vote early in the Sunday-to-Thursday run rather than trusting a last-minute return, since the poll is shut down on schedule regardless of how close the totals are.

Every week brings a fresh ballot. Once a poll closes, its results stand and the Advertiser publishes a fresh Girls Athlete of the Week poll covering the next week's standout performances, with a new set of nominees and a new link in the paper's coverage. The poll.fm address attached to this page is the latest ballot in the series, and the nominees on it are real high school athletes, so the page describes the programme and its mechanics rather than the individual names.

One caution on timing: the sample ballot titled in the poll listing covers an April 20-24 week and is already marked closed, which is a reminder that each poll.fm page belongs to a single week. Always check the headline on the ballot you open to be sure the window is still live before you submit.

Where this poll sits among Alabama's other fan votes

The Girls Athlete of the Week belongs to a wider family of Alabama high school fan votes, most of them run by the same publishers on the same Crowdsignal machinery. Six neighbouring programmes sit beside it on this site, each carrying its own ballot at its own route:

• Alabama High School Baseball Player of the Week
• Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week
• Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Year
• Alabama High School Football Player of the Week
• Alabama High School Football Player of the Year
• Alabama High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week

What separates the Vance Law Firm poll from those neighbours is its scope. The baseball, basketball and football ballots are sport specific, and the player of the year votes run at season's end, while the Girls Athlete of the Week is open across girls sports generally, naming a new honoree every week whatever the season. A softball standout in April and a basketball standout in January compete through the same weekly format.

It also differs in sponsorship. The programme title carries the Vance Law Firm name as presenter, a local business association that several of the sport-specific Alabama ballots do not share. From a supporter's vantage the practical difference is small: every programme in the list is a public vote, every one is decided by raw tally, and a community that turns out for one poll can carry the same habit to the others.

Strengthening support within the rules of this ballot

Support in this poll is built on turnout inside a four-day window, so the useful moves are the simple ones. Pass the poll.fm link straight to the nominee's community, teammates, classmates, family group chats, as soon as the ballot opens on Sunday, because noon on Thursday arrives quickly. The ballot carries no rules text from the Advertiser, so supporters should take the poll at face value: one selection per submission, decided by the tally shown. Anything that games the mechanics, repeated automated submissions or vote software, cuts against a poll whose whole point is a visible community count, and publishers of reader awards routinely discard votes they judge irregular. The honest path, early sharing and a real turnout push before Thursday noon, is also the one that leaves nothing to dispute afterwards. For general tactics that work across public fan votes, see our votes guide.