Who is The Bulletin Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What The Bulletin Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

Each week, The Bulletin invites its readers to crown a standout Connecticut high school athlete through this named award. The Bulletin is a newspaper whose home on the web is norwichbulletin.com, and the athlete of the week feature is one of its reader engagement formats: the publisher names a slate of nominees from area schools, posts them to a polling page, and lets its audience decide the winner. The vertical is high school sport, and the mechanic is simply a public count among the listed nominees, with no entry fee, and no nomination form for the general public on the materials available.

The balloting lives on Crowdsignal's poll.fm service rather than on the paper's own domain. The representative ballot for this page sits at poll.fm/17099700. Because the series produces one ballot per week during the school year, that address is the newest ballot rather than a permanent home page, and each new week's question carries its own poll.fm number.

The schools and towns that appear on the ballot's nominee lists root the series in eastern Connecticut. Names affiliated with Plainfield, Killingly, Griswold, Norwich Tech and NFA have appeared on a sampled weekly ballot, which places the program in the cluster of towns the newspaper covers. For readers, that means a given week's slate is local by design: the nominees come from the schools in the paper's coverage area, not from a statewide pool.

The dated history for this series

The series has confirmed appearances across 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The 2022 entry stands apart from the rest, and the run then reappears as a steady weekly fixture through the 2024, 2025 and 2026 seasons. On the strength of those years the program qualifies as an annual cycle, with individual ballots inside each cycle arriving week by week rather than as a single once-a-year vote.

Across the recent seasons the ballots carry dates spanning September through June, which tracks the Connecticut high school sports year from fall through spring. That span is the series' shape: a fresh question most weeks while school sports are in session, and a quiet stretch over the summer months. The publisher's own promotion of a given week's vote has named its window directly, as in the instruction to "cast your vote for The Bulletin Athlete of the Week for the period of January 5-10," which shows how a week's ballot is framed as a dated period.

The most recent ballot on file closed with a clear leader: the top finisher drew 4,137 votes, a 29 percent share, ahead of a second-place total of 3,051 votes at 21 percent, with two further nominees tied in the fourteen percent range at 1,964 and 1,947 votes. Those totals come from a single week's closed poll and say nothing about other weeks, but they show the scale the series reaches within one weekly window.

What the available materials do not carry is any stated rule text. The publisher prints no nomination procedure and no eligibility wording alongside the ballot, and no fixed calendar for when each week's window opens. Those details are the reader's to check at the source.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Taking part takes only a minute. A supporter opens the week's poll.fm page, reads the slate of nominated athletes, marks a single choice, and submits. Crowdsignal registers the selection on the spot and folds it into the running totals that every visitor to that ballot can see. There is no account to create on the available form, no fee, and no visible gate between arriving at the page and casting a choice.

One practical point matters more than any other in a weekly series: the ballot is only live for its own week. The page linked from here holds the newest ballot on file, and it currently stands closed, meaning its voting window has passed and its final standings are on display. When the publisher posts the next week's question, it lives at a new poll.fm address, and the date it goes live is not published anywhere in the materials at hand; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because each ballot is its own poll, a supporter who wants their athlete to win has to act inside that week's window rather than assuming a standing vote carries forward. Nothing on the ballot indicates a limit on how often a single person may participate across the season, and nothing indicates whether returning to the same ballot more than once is accepted. Both points are unstated on the publisher's side, so the form itself is the final word during any live window.

Supporters who want a fuller picture of how public polls of this kind behave, including how totals can move late in a window, can look at our votes guide for the general mechanics that apply across Crowdsignal-style ballots.

How this ballot sits beside its Connecticut neighbours

The Bulletin Athlete of the Week belongs to a wider family of Connecticut public-vote programs on this site, and it is the only one run by The Bulletin as a newspaper property. The others come from different organizers, which is the main dividing line in the market: a publisher's weekly reader feature and a sponsor-backed award answer to different rules and different calendars even when they serve the same school sports audience.

Its closest neighbours by format are the weekly player-of-the-week ballots, including the Connecticut High School Football Player of the Week and the Connecticut High School Basketball Player of the Week, which follow the same weekly rhythm inside their own seasons. Season-long awards sit further apart in shape, such as the Connecticut Gatorade Football Player of the Year, where a single cycle decides one award rather than a fresh question every week.

Spring and secondary sports are covered too, through the Connecticut High School Baseball Player of the Week and the boys and girls lacrosse weekly ballots at boys lacrosse and girls lacrosse. What separates the Bulletin series from all of them is its publisher's authority over its own nominees: The Bulletin picks the slate from its coverage area each week, so the ballot reflects one newsroom's view of the week in local sport, and the towns on it, such as Plainfield, Killingly, Griswold and Norwich, track that coverage rather than a statewide field.

Strengthening support for an athlete in this series

Because each ballot is a short weekly window on Crowdsignal, timing matters as much as reach. A nominee's best results come from supporters who see the ballot early in its window and share it while attention is fresh, rather than in a single push at the end. The publisher's own pattern, announcing each week's period in its coverage, gives supporters a natural signal for when to rally: the moment the new slate appears is the moment to pass the link through the school's community, team groups and local pages.

The organizer publishes no rule addressing outside help, purchased participation or voting software for this series, so no organizer statement either permits or forbids it here. What is known is the shape of the vote itself: a single-choice public poll with visible running totals, where real participation from the Plainfield, Killingly, Griswold and Norwich school communities is what the totals measure. Anyone weighing paid support in a poll of this kind can review the general options at award votes, keeping in mind that the organizer has printed no position on the practice for this series.