Fort Collins Blue FCU Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A newspaper poll with a Thursday morning close

Most people find a prep fan-vote poll on a weekend. The Blue FCU poll closes Thursday at 11:59 a.m. — during first period. That single fact is more strategically significant than any other detail on this page, and it goes unread by the majority of people who show up to vote Thursday afternoon and find the ballot locked.

The Coloradoan runs this as a print-and-digital newspaper cycle, not a sports media cycle. The week's nominees go up Monday, voting runs four days, and Thursday morning the poll closes so the winner can be written up before the next wave of weekend sports begins. That rhythm is the paper's, not a convenience for fans. Adjust to it or lose the window.

The other structural feature is the dual ballot. Boys and Girls run as separate polls with separate nominees and separate winners. Preston Mozer (Fort Collins HS, Boys Athlete of the Year) and the Wellington swimmer (Girls Athlete of the Year) won independent contests that never shared a vote between them. If you have a girl athlete on the ballot, her supporters' votes belong in her article — they don't help a boy nominee in a different poll, and vice versa. Finding the correct weekly article is the first task; finding it on Monday rather than Wednesday is the second.

What the 86.3% tells you about how this community votes

Preston Mozer's 86.3% win in the Boys Athlete of the Year was not decided on a slow week. The annual award draws from the season's weekly winners — a pool of athletes who have already cleared a five-person nomination ballot at least once. Winning 86.3% against that caliber of field means one school's supporters moved together at a scale the others didn't match.

Fort Collins High School is a 4A program. In the coverage area, it sits below Fossil Ridge and Rocky Mountain in enrollment — both 5A schools with larger absolute alumni networks. And yet Mozer's win was a margin that neither school matched in that annual cycle. The pattern shows up in the weekly polls too: Fossil Ridge has produced confirmed nominees across basketball, track, and baseball (Malachi Egbuji, Jaimeson Peterson, and others); Rocky Mountain has nominees in football and track (Bode Nesbitt, Caleb Emery). The 5A schools generate nominees. But the 4A Fort Collins community, concentrated in one city, turned out.

Wellington is smaller still — a 3A school at the edge of the coverage area, north in Larimer County. Its swimmer won the Girls Athlete of the Year. That is the same pattern. A school that can reach its whole community in one group chat has a structural advantage over a school that has to move ten thousand loosely connected followers. Absolute school size does not predict who wins here.

The coverage map: Larimer County and its edges

The Coloradoan covers Fort Collins and its surrounding communities — Larimer County at the core, with a fringe into Weld County that picks up Windsor and Severance. The schools that appear on the ballot reflect that geography.

The CHSAA class split explains something non-obvious. Fossil Ridge and Rocky Mountain are the two largest 5A schools in the area and generate the most nominees across the most sports. But the classes below them — Windsor, Severance, Timnath, and Wellington — consistently appear on the ballot, and Wellington's swimmer won the annual Girls award. Private and charter schools (Heritage Christian, Liberty Common) are explicitly in scope too; Alec Lundy of Heritage Christian made the Boys ballot in April 2026 after sweeping the hurdles and winning the high jump at the Mile High League championships. The ballot is not a 5A-only list.

Four days, and how to use them

The poll opens Monday. The clock is already running when most people learn a nominee exists. The Coloradoan's framing — "vote every Monday through Thursday" — is itself the strategy guide: spread the effort across all four days rather than concentrating everything in one session.

Two paths get a nominee through: wide reach or concentrated reach. Fossil Ridge and Rocky Mountain have larger absolute communities — thousands of current families, alumni, and followers across multiple sports. Reaching all of them before Thursday morning is a logistics problem, and loosely connected networks are slow to pass a link reliably. Wellington and Heritage Christian have fewer people but are easier to reach entirely in one signal chain. Four days is enough for a tight community to move every person it knows. It is not enough for a large community to move a fraction of the people it knows.

The nomination deadline (Sunday at 11:59 p.m.) is where campaigns begin, not where the poll opens. An athlete whose stats are submitted Sunday night with the full context — sport, school, opponent, result, stat line — gives Coloradoan staff what they need. If the athlete doesn't make this week's five, next Sunday is the next window. The path into the ballot is the same every week.

For a full picture of Colorado prep fan votes, see the Colorado contest guide, and for the national directory of prep polls, /usa/ has the full index. The how-to guide covers the weekly campaign cadence in detail. If you need support moving votes during that four-day window, vote-support services built for weekly fan polls can add volume on demand — but Monday is the day to start, not Wednesday.