Star Local Media Colorado Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing most voters here don't know

Star Local Media isn't a single-metro operation. The same publisher runs an identically structured Athlete of the Week ballot for North Texas, covering Collin and Denton county schools. Same five-to-six nominee format. Same weekly reset. Different state, different counties, one shared template. So if a nominee's family has moved between the Denver and Dallas suburbs, or a coach has coached in both markets, this isn't a coincidence, it's the same newsroom process running twice.

What's missing here matters just as much. Star Local Media doesn't publish weekly vote totals, a running leaderboard, or an archive of past winners on the ballot page itself. That's a real gap for anyone trying to gauge how close a given week's race actually is. Compare that to the statewide Colorado Athlete of the Week run separately by High School on SI, which pulls from every CHSAA classification and posts on its own cycle. Two different Colorado athlete polls, two different publishers, no shared data between them. The broader Colorado fan-vote hub lists both side by side, along with the state's other weekly ballots.

What we actually know about the nominee pool (and what's still a gap)

Confirmed: five to six names, drawn weekly from Jefferson, Douglas, and Arapahoe county schools, picked by the Star Local Media sports desk rather than by public nomination form. Not confirmed anywhere on the public ballot page: a nomination email, a submission deadline for suggesting an athlete, or any tally of how many votes a winning performance pulled. That's a thinner public record than some sibling polls in this state carry, and it's worth saying plainly rather than papering over.

The three counties aren't interchangeable. Jefferson County sprawls across the western metro and carries the largest raw school count of the three. Douglas County is the newer, faster-growing south-metro slice. Arapahoe covers the southeast, a mix of older inner-ring suburbs and newer developments. A nominee's county tells you roughly which reader base is likely to see the post first, Star Local Media's coverage naturally skews toward whichever county's local paper carries the heaviest circulation that week. None of that is published as a metric. It's inference from how the publication itself is structured.

Mechanics: where this differs from the SI standard

Most statewide Athlete of the Week polls in this space close Sunday night. This one doesn't. It runs to 10 a.m. Monday, a few extra hours that matter more than they sound like they should, because a coach checking results before first period Monday is checking a ballot that's already closed. And unlike SBLive's national template, there's no per-device vote cap listed on the page, no number, no language about multiple submissions, nothing. That's either an oversight in the publisher's copy or a deliberate choice to keep the rules loose; the page doesn't say which. General mechanics for how these embedded weekly polls typically run are covered in how online voting works.

One housekeeping note that trips people up: old weekly posts stay live on the site after they close. Check the date stamp before voting. A five-minute search that lands on last week's post instead of this week's is a vote cast into a ballot that already reset. For anyone weighing whether outside vote support fits a program like this, the legality question and the safety question are worth reading before, not after.

Running a real push in a three-county, multi-sport market

Football gets the headlines in the fall. But this ballot rotates through basketball, wrestling, track, and whatever else the school-year calendar throws up next, so a generic "share on social media" plan doesn't fit a program that changes sport every few weeks. What works instead: a message that names the athlete, the school, the county, and the exact Monday 10 a.m. cutoff, sent to people who already have a reason to care, teammates, the booster group tied to that specific school, family in the other suburbs. Real fan-vote turnout follows the same logic here as anywhere else online voting happens, and the broader social-media outreach playbook applies just as well to a three-county ballot as a single-school one.

Because there's no published cap and no visible leaderboard, the only signal a campaign gets is whether the post still shows the nominee leading when checked. Fan-poll vote support can add weight behind a genuine push in the final weekend hours, and the same core voting guidance applies whether the nominee is from Jefferson, Douglas, or Arapahoe. Families tracking a student-athlete across sports can also watch the Colorado Player of the Year and Colorado Softball Player of the Year ballots, both drawing from overlapping suburban Denver school communities.