Pueblo Chieftain Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The gap that separates this ballot from every other Colorado prep poll

Midnight Friday. That's the whole story here. Every other weekly athlete poll in this state closes earlier, Sunday night for the statewide SI ballot, Monday morning for suburban Denver's Star Local Media poll. The Pueblo Chieftain runs to midnight Friday instead, and it pairs that later close with something rarer still: no stated vote-limit restriction on the current page. Two structural choices, both looser than the state norm, both undocumented as to why.

What's missing matters too. No public archive of past winners. No running vote count during the week. No confirmed sponsor name on the record available here. That's a thinner public footprint than Fort Collins's Blue FCU-branded ballot carries, and it's worth naming the gap directly rather than inventing detail to paper over it. What is confirmed: a Gannett-run poll, an every-sport-eligible ballot rather than football-only, and that midnight Friday cutoff.

The uncapped structure changes campaign math more than people expect. A poll with a hard per-device limit rewards reaching the most distinct voters. A poll with no stated cap rewards sustained turnout from whoever is already engaged, right up until the window closes. The mechanics of pacing a real-turnout push against a deadline like this one are covered in the online vote-buying guide.

Why an every-sport ballot behaves differently than a football-only one

Most weekly prep polls in Colorado and neighboring states lock onto football for the fall and go quiet the rest of the year. The Chieftain's ballot doesn't. It rotates through whatever sport is actually in season, cross country and volleyball in the fall, wrestling and basketball in winter, track in spring. That means the campaign playbook has to reset every few weeks too. A volleyball nominee's natural support network, teammates, club coaches, a specific gym's parent group, looks nothing like a wrestling nominee's, and neither looks like a cross-country program's.

It also means there's no single peak week to plan around. A football-only poll has a predictable Friday-night rhythm building toward a weekend close. This ballot's rhythm depends entirely on which sport is up, and a supporter checking in only during football season will miss every other cycle the poll runs. General mechanics for this style of rotating-sport fan poll are covered in how to get votes for an online contest.

Pueblo, Fort Collins, and suburban Denver run three separate polls under one parent company

Gannett owns both the Pueblo Chieftain and the Coloradoan in Fort Collins, but the two run independently. Fort Collins splits its ballot into parallel Boys and Girls polls with five nominees apiece, sponsored by Blue Federal Credit Union, closing Thursday at 11:59 a.m. Pueblo runs one combined ballot, no stated sponsor on the current page, and a much later midnight Friday close. Same corporate owner, two newsrooms, two different sets of rules. Star Local Media's suburban Denver poll is a third, entirely separate operation with its own Monday 10 a.m. close and no shared nominee pool with either Gannett property.

Pueblo's own coverage footprint runs across District 60 in the city itself, District 70 in the surrounding county, and Pueblo West further out, with the Arkansas Valley and southern Colorado conferences rounding out the mix. That's a working-class steel-city market with a different athletic identity than the Front Range suburbs, and a Pueblo West nominee competing against a District 60 city-school nominee on the same ballot isn't unusual here, it's the normal shape of the pool. For the statewide picture this poll sits inside, Colorado's SI-run Athlete of the Week and Colorado's Player of the Year track the season-long and cross-market view, and the full slate of Colorado polls sits at the Colorado contest hub, part of the wider USA contest directory.

Running a real push here means naming the school district, the sport, and the exact midnight Friday cutoff when reaching out, since a generic reminder gets lost against three other Colorado polls using three different deadlines. Fan-poll vote support can add weight behind a genuine push in the closing hours before that Friday deadline, and the same core turnout guidance applies whether the nominee is from Pueblo, Pueblo West, or the Arkansas Valley.