Norwich Bulletin Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Norwich Bulletin vs. the statewide polls: who closes when, and who counts

Three fan-vote polls touch Eastern Connecticut high school sports in a given week, and they are not the same poll wearing different logos. WFSB runs a statewide broadcast poll across all eight Connecticut counties, closing Friday evening ahead of its newscast. A separate statewide Connecticut High School Athlete of the Week ballot runs on its own schedule too. Then there's the Norwich Bulletin's own poll: regional, print-adjacent, run by a two-county sports desk instead of a network newsroom. It's one entry on the wider Connecticut fan-vote poll list this site tracks.

What actually separates the Bulletin's version isn't the trophy. It's the size of the pond. A nominee here competes against maybe a dozen other Eastern Connecticut kids, not every athlete in the state. The WFSB ballot draws from eight counties and dozens of towns; the Bulletin draws from three counties' worth of schools that mostly already know each other from league play.

Why the Friday close changes the whole week

Most statewide sports polls in this state stretch into the weekend. This one doesn't. A performance from Friday or Saturday night has until the following Friday at 5 p.m., call it five business days, not seven calendar ones. Miss the Thursday push and there's no Saturday-morning recovery lap.

That compression matters more here than it would for a Sunday-close poll because the Bulletin's audience skews toward people checking a specific newspaper site rather than scrolling a statewide broadcaster's app. Norwich Free Academy alumni networks, for instance, tend to circulate a specific article link rather than a general "go vote" post, and that link stops working functionally the moment 5 p.m. Friday passes. The nominee list itself is confirmed multi-sport: basketball, wrestling, football, and cross country have all appeared depending on season, so the athletic identity of "who's up this week" shifts constantly rather than settling on one sport.

How the two counties actually differ, and how nominations reach the desk

Norwich and the New London County towns along the lower Thames River include Norwich Free Academy, one of the region's largest programs by enrollment. Windham County sits inland and runs smaller (Windham, Putnam, Killingly), with its own conference footprint. Many schools from both counties overlap in the Eastern Connecticut Conference (ECC), so a nominee from an ECC school is usually up against a familiar league rival, not a stranger from across the state.

Nominations aren't submitted through a form. They come from the Bulletin sports desk covering games directly. So the practical move for a coach or parent is simple, and a little unglamorous: email the sports desk early in the week with the school, the sport, and specifics on what happened, the opponent, the stat line, why it mattered. A big performance in a lower-coverage Windham County town can get missed if nobody flags it, since the desk can't be at every game in a two-county footprint.

Worth separating out plainly: this sports poll has nothing to do with the Bulletin's own Best of Eastern Connecticut business readers'-choice contest, which runs on the Gannett YourChoiceAwards platform for restaurants and local services. Same publisher, unrelated ballot.

Running a campaign for a Norwich Bulletin nominee

No account, no fee, no gimmick, which means the campaign is entirely about reach and timing, not clearing a signup wall. The people worth reaching are the ones already tied to the school: current students, parents, alumni chains, and whatever town-level Facebook group still gets used for local news.

Send the message once Monday or Tuesday with the school, sport, and the Friday 5 p.m. cutoff spelled out plainly. Then send it again Thursday. Because there's no weekend runway here, a slow start on Monday is much harder to recover from than it would be on a poll closing Sunday night, there simply isn't a Saturday left to fix it. For the general mechanics of fan-poll campaigns, see the fan poll voting guide and how fan-vote polls work; the real-votes guide covers legitimate turnout tactics in more depth. Football nominees specifically also show up on the Connecticut High School Football Player of the Week page, season-long standouts on Connecticut High School Player of the Year, and other states' weekly ballots are indexed at the USA fan-vote hub.