Gadsden Times Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one rule that separates this poll from Alabama's other fan votes

Only a coach can put a name on this ballot. Not a parent, not a booster club president, not the athlete's own Instagram account tagging the sports desk: the Gadsden Times accepts nominations at [email protected], and the stated channel is coaches. That single detail changes the shape of a campaign before a single vote is cast.

The Gadsden Times covers Gadsden and the rest of Etowah County, in Alabama's northeast corner — a different scale entirely from the SBLive-run Alabama High School Athlete of the Week, which spans all eight AHSAA regions statewide. This is a regional daily's poll, syndicated further out to AOL and MSN, but the nominee pool itself is drawn from one county and its immediate neighbors, boys' and girls' sports alike.

The other structural difference is timing. Most Alabama newspaper sports polls close on a weekend night, when families have time to check a phone between dinner and bed. This one closes Thursday at noon, the middle of a school and work day. That scheduling choice is the second thing worth understanding before building a vote plan, and it shapes nearly every tactical decision that follows.

What the Gadsden Times has confirmed about this poll, and what it hasn't

Here is the full list of what's actually published. The poll runs weekly. It closes every Thursday at noon. Coaches send nominations to [email protected]. The same ballot appears on AOL and MSN in addition to gadsdentimes.com. And the Gadsden Times has kept the poll running across both the 2024 and 2025 seasons. Two confirmed cycles, not a one-off promotion that quietly disappeared.

What isn't published is almost as informative. There's no stated per-device or per-hour vote limit, unlike the statewide Alabama SBLive poll's six-hour cooldown. There's no announced day for the winner reveal, only the Thursday deadline. And there's no searchable archive of past winners on the site, so finding a specific week's result depends on whatever a search engine has indexed from that week's article.

That gap between what's public and what isn't matters more than it looks. A poll with no stated vote cap and no announced reveal date isn't necessarily looser than one with detailed rules; it just means anyone entering a campaign should treat the current live poll page as the only authority, checked fresh each week rather than assumed from a prior cycle.

How the Thursday-noon deadline actually plays out, week to week

Noon on a Thursday is an odd deadline for a fan poll, and that's exactly why it deserves its own explanation. Most people who'd vote for a nominee are in a classroom, at a desk, or on a shop floor at that hour. Evening and weekend closes (the norm for most Alabama newspaper sports polls) catch people when they're already on their phones. A Thursday-noon close does not.

That timing pushes the real campaign window earlier in the week than a typical fan-vote poll allows. If a nomination reaches the sports desk after that week's ballot has already gone up, the performance simply waits for a future week rather than making the current one. Because the paper hasn't published a fixed day for when a new ballot opens, the safest habit for a coach is sending the submission as soon as Monday's game film is reviewed, not waiting for a deadline that isn't posted anywhere.

The AOL and MSN syndication is worth understanding rather than worrying about. These sites typically mirror the same embedded poll widget rather than running an independent copy, so a vote cast through the MSN version and a vote cast directly on gadsdentimes.com both add to one shared count. A family member who finds the poll through an MSN sports feed rather than the newspaper's own site is still voting in the same contest, not a separate one.

Because there's no confirmed per-device cap, the honest answer to "how many times can I vote" is to check the live poll page each week — the paper could add or remove a stated limit without a separate announcement. For how these embedded newspaper polls generally work across other markets, the online contest voting guide covers the baseline mechanics before you get into what's specific to Gadsden.

The Etowah County network that actually moves a nomination forward

Gadsden City, Southside, Glencoe, Hokes Bluff, Sardis, and Rainbow City's Westbrook Christian all sit within about a fifteen-minute drive of each other. That density matters for a poll built around a Thursday-noon deadline: there isn't much time to build momentum, so a tight geographic cluster where people already know each other's coach, pastor, and booster-club treasurer closes that gap fast.

Because only a coach can submit the nomination, the coach is also the natural first mobilizer once the ballot goes live. A coach who forwards the gadsdentimes.com poll link to the team group chat, the athletic booster email list, and the front office the same morning the ballot posts has covered more ground than one who waits until Wednesday night.

The neighboring counties add real reach without adding complexity. Boaz and Albertville in Marshall County, Ashville in St. Clair County, Cherokee County High School, and Collinsville in DeKalb County all sit inside the paper's broader coverage radius. A nominee from any of these programs draws on a community that reads the Gadsden Times for more than sports, which is a different kind of engagement than a reader who clicks in only for the poll itself.

None of this requires anything unusual. A text with the direct poll link, sent Monday morning rather than Wednesday afternoon, reaches the same people either way; it just reaches them with more days left on the clock. For the general playbook behind building that kind of push, the how-to voting guide walks through the cadence. For polls specifically built like this one, sports fan-poll vote support exists for campaigns that have worked the organic network and are still short heading into Thursday.

Getting a coach nomination in, and what a win is actually worth

The nomination itself is simple on paper: an email to [email protected] with the athlete's name, school, sport, and what happened that week. Stronger submissions include a specific number: a final score, a time, a save count, whatever the sport measures, rather than a general "had a great week" note. Coaches who've watched what the sports desk picks up tend to lead with the stat line, not the adjectives.

Once the ballot is live, the campaign math is straightforward given the Thursday-noon close: roughly three and a half working days sit between a typical Monday post and the deadline, not the five-plus days a Friday-night or Sunday-night poll allows elsewhere. Every hour spent waiting to share the link is an hour that doesn't come back before noon Thursday.

A win here produces one concrete, confirmed thing: a dated, named article in a regional Gannett paper, findable by searching the athlete's name for years afterward. Nothing in what the Gadsden Times has published points to a cash prize or physical trophy attached to the honor. The write-up itself is the reward, and for a program in a smaller Etowah-area town, that kind of independent, third-party mention is harder to come by anywhere else.

On the question that comes up with any fan-vote poll, the practical line is the same one that applies across nearly every open newspaper poll: automated scripts and bot traffic that fake a human vote get flagged and removed, while a real supporter casting a real vote (however they were reminded to do it) is just a vote. This overview of the legal landscape around buying votes covers the distinction in more depth, and the same logic applies to a small regional poll like this one as it does to a national contest. For how the Gadsden Times poll compares with the rest of the state's fan-vote landscape, the Alabama contest directory lays out every program by classification and mechanic, and the national /usa/ index covers every state.