Alaska's News Source Student Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The mix-up almost every Anchorage voter makes first

Two athlete-of-the-week polls exist in the Anchorage television market, and they are not the same contest. YourAlaskaLink, the other Anchorage station group, runs its own separate ballot. Alaska's News Source, the joint newsroom behind KTUU (the NBC affiliate) and KYES (MyNetworkTV), publishes its Student Athlete of the Week independently at alaskasnewssource.com/sports/athlete-of-the-week. Type the wrong station name into a search bar and a voter can spend ten minutes hunting for a ballot that was never on that site to begin with.

That confusion has a practical cost. A booster group sharing "the athlete of the week link" in a group chat without the exact URL risks half the household clicking through to the wrong station's poll and voting for nothing that counts toward the nominee they meant to support. The two polls draw from overlapping schools: Anchorage School District programs, Eagle River, Chugiak. But they're run by competing newsrooms, with separate ballots, separate publishing schedules, and no shared vote count.

What is confirmed directly from the Alaska's News Source sports section: the poll sits under the station's own sports vertical, refreshes weekly alongside a written athlete profile, and does not require a login of any kind. For a broader look at how newsroom-run fan polls like this one typically operate, the online contest voting guide walks through the general mechanics before the Alaska specifics below.

How the KTUU/KYES sports desk actually runs this ballot

The page lives at alaskasnewssource.com/sports/athlete-of-the-week. Unlike a syndicated national platform, this poll is produced in-house by the station's own sports reporters: the profile text and the vote widget both come from the same newsroom, published together as one post each cycle. That in-house model means the publishing rhythm follows the sports desk's own editorial calendar rather than a fixed national schedule, so the exact day a new ballot goes live can shift week to week around game coverage and holidays.

Being newsroom-produced rather than platform-syndicated cuts a different way from the ASAA-wide poll that SI's High School on SI network runs for the entire state, the statewide Alaska Athlete of the Week poll. Alaska's News Source picks its own profile subject and writes its own copy, with no separate editorial layer sifting through a large statewide submission pool the way a syndicated platform does when it processes hundreds of weekly entries at once. A tip that reaches the right reporter directly carries real weight here.

Why Anchorage's school geography changes how this poll plays out

Anchorage School District alone runs several large comprehensive high schools: Dimond, East, West, South, Service, Bartlett, clustered within a metro area of roughly 290,000 people. Eagle River and Chugiak sit north along the Glenn Highway, each with its own high school and a distinct, tighter community identity than the bigger Anchorage campuses draw on.

That geography matters for a poll with no published vote cap. A Dimond or East Anchorage nominee pulls from a much larger raw enrollment base than an Eagle River or Chugiak nominee does. But raw school size isn't the only variable in an uncapped ballot. How tightly a community shares one link, and how many times each supporter returns to click again, shifts the outcome as much as enrollment does. A smaller Chugiak program with an active parent booster page can post the same link repeatedly across a week; a larger Anchorage school relying on one announcement in a school newsletter reaches more people but with less repetition per person.

Season timing plays a role too. Winter sports (basketball, wrestling, indoor track) dominate the Anchorage prep calendar for a longer stretch than in states with a football-heavy fall culture, given Southcentral Alaska's climate and daylight pattern. A ballot published in January looks structurally different from one in May, simply because the pool of eligible nominees and the fans actively following them shifts by season. For the wider Alaska contest landscape this poll sits inside, the Alaska contest hub lays out the full picture, and the national fan-vote index sets this in-house Anchorage newsroom model against the syndicated statewide polls other states run.

Getting a nomination noticed, then working the week

Because Alaska's News Source writes its own athlete profiles rather than running an open submission form, the practical path to a nomination runs through the sports desk directly: a message to the station's sports reporters, through the contact channels listed on alaskasnewssource.com, describing the performance and why it stood out that week. A submission naming the school, the sport, the specific game or meet, and a clear result gives a reporter something concrete to build a profile around, rather than a vague "check out this athlete" request.

Once a profile and ballot are live, the absence of a published cap changes the math from a rate-limited poll. Every additional vote a device casts counts, so the lever that moves a tally here is return visits from real people, not just first-click reach. A parent, a coach, and a handful of teammates each voting more than once across the week compounds faster than the same group voting a single time.

Distribution matters more than any single tactic. The direct link (not a screenshot, not just the athlete's name) shared to a team group chat, a booster club's page, and the school's own social accounts reaches people who are already primed to click through. Timing a reminder mid-week, once the initial share has cooled off, tends to catch supporters who missed the first post entirely. When the organic network has been tapped out and a gap remains, structured vote-support services exist for polls of this shape. Paced, human-pattern delivery is what keeps that kind of support indistinguishable from organic turnout; a burst of identical rapid clicks is what actually draws scrutiny.

Where this poll sits on Alaska's wider fan-vote map

Alaska runs more of these public ballots than people expect for a state with under a million residents. The Alaska Sports Hall of Fame public ballot honors adult inductees rather than active students, so its voter base and its stakes differ from a weekly high school poll like this one. The Best of Alaska Business poll isn't sport-related at all, run by a trade magazine rather than a TV newsroom, but it shares the same free, no-login structure Alaska's News Source uses here.

The state's best-known public vote by far is Fat Bear Week, the Katmai National Park bracket that draws national attention every October. That contest and this one share almost nothing in scale. Fat Bear Week pulls millions of votes from across the country, while a single week of the Alaska's News Source poll stays local to one television market. The comparison still holds a lesson: a well-run, free, no-account ballot can generate real engagement without a cash prize attached. For readers weighing whether organized vote support raises legal questions on any of these polls, this breakdown of contest voting rules covers the general legal picture that applies across all of them.