Delaware Online Football Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters get wrong about this poll

Delaware Online runs two separate fall polls, and mixing them up costs votes. The multi-sport "Athlete of the Week" ballot lumps football alongside volleyball, soccer, and cross-country nominees on one list. The Football Athlete of the Week is a distinct poll — football players only, published on its own article — running through the entire fall football season, Weeks 1 through 13, into the DIAA championship games in late November and early December.

Both polls are embedded widgets inside dated articles at delawareonline.com. Both use the same voting mechanic. The difference is in the headline. If the article says "Athlete of the Week nominees for Fall Week X," that is the multi-sport ballot. If it says "Football Athlete of the Week," that is this one. It is a small distinction that matters when your player's name only appears on one of them.

The other thing worth knowing immediately: this poll closes Thursday. Not Sunday, not Monday. Thursday. Most weekly high school fan polls in other states run through the weekend; this one does not. Winners are announced Friday on Delaware Online and typically posted to the Delaware Online Facebook page. The compressed window changes how a campaign has to be timed — Wednesday evening and Thursday are the closing hours, full stop.

What the 2024 record actually shows

The most fully documented week on record is Week 5, 2024. Five nominees appeared. Makai Walker of Middletown ran 14 times for 117 yards and 3 touchdowns. Brady McBride of Salesianum threw for 213 yards and 5 touchdowns. Jayvion Chandler of Indian River ran for 179 yards and 3 touchdowns and added 3 receptions for 56 yards and another score — one of the more complete single-game lines in the documented 2024 sample. Jahsiear Rogers of Appoquinimink caught 6 passes for 169 yards and a touchdown. Jack Homer of Tatnall made 7 tackles and broke up 3 passes.

Chandler's Indian River teammate (identified in the source as "Indian River running back," full name not confirmed) won that week. That is worth noting: five nominees from schools spread across New Castle and Sussex counties, and a Sussex County school won. Indian River is in Dagsboro, near the southern end of the state. Delaware is small, but the poll is genuinely statewide in reach.

The championship-week ballot in late November 2024 shows the range even more clearly. Three nominees, one from each DIAA class final: Dorian Rutledge, a senior defensive back at Middletown (2 interceptions in the Class 3A championship win); Teigan Norris, a sophomore kicker at Red Lion Christian Academy (the winning extra point in Class 2A overtime); Je'Viohn Hurst, a sophomore linebacker at Seaford (the two-point conversion stop in Class 1A overtime). All three were directly from championship game outcomes. The poll leaned defensive and special-teams that week — which is unusual, and a signal that editors pick on context, not just yardage.

Week 12 added a geographic note. Aiden Lego of Salesianum (New Castle County) ran for 221 yards and 3 touchdowns and caught a 31-yard touchdown pass. Hanif Miller of Middletown (also New Castle County) added 87 yards and a fumble recovery. Darnell Stokes of Indian River (Sussex County) contributed 54 rush yards, a touchdown, and an onside kick recovery. Two schools from the same county on the same ballot alongside one from 80 miles south — that is the geographic spread this poll holds together.

~30 programs, three classes, one ballot

Delaware runs roughly 30 high school football programs. That number is small enough to fit context on a single page without a lookup table.

DIAA organizes football into Class 1A, Class 2A, and Class 3A, each with Division I and Division II tiers. Middletown and Salesianum are the confirmed 3A regulars in this poll's record. Indian River and Red Lion Christian Academy anchor the 2A appearances. Seaford represents 1A. Caravel Academy won Week 13. Appoquinimink and Tatnall each had a nominee in the documented weeks.

The classification gap does not determine poll outcomes here — the championship-week ballot literally ran a 1A program against a 2A and a 3A program on the same list, and all three were real contenders. What the class tiers do tell you is something about community structure. A 1A school in a small Sussex County town runs a tighter network than a 3A Wilmington school with a larger but more dispersed alumni base. Both can win. The 1A school's advantage is speed of mobilization; the 3A school's advantage is raw pool size. Neither is decisive on its own.

Salesianum and Red Lion Christian are both private schools and both appeared on documented ballots. DIAA private-school classification works separately from the public-school enrollment tiers, but the Delaware Online poll does not separate them — Salesianum's Brady McBride and Seaford's Je'Viohn Hurst competed on equal footing on the ballot, regardless of school type.

Running a campaign before Thursday closes it

Two tasks, in order: get the nomination in, then move votes before Thursday night.

Nominations go to Brandon Holveck at [email protected]. The article typically publishes Monday. A submission that arrives Sunday night or earlier — player name, school, position, the full stat line, the opponent, the score — gives the best chance of making that week's ballot. Delaware Online has covered Week 1 through championship week in 2024; a good performance that nobody submits can be missed.

Once the ballot is live, the window is four days, and the realistic closing push is Wednesday to Thursday. Delaware's school communities are small enough that a single coordinated push through a team group chat and the school's booster social accounts can reach most of a program's network in one afternoon. That is the actual structural advantage of a small-state poll: the connections are shorter. A player who texts their own teammates, a booster page that posts on Wednesday and again Thursday morning — that is a meaningful fraction of a school's reachable fan base, not a drop in a much larger bucket.

For open, uncapped weekly polls where the outcome is settled entirely by how many real fans vote before the close, structured vote-support campaigns exist to extend reach beyond the immediate school community. The how-to guide covers the weekly cadence for open fan polls. More Delaware contests, including the multi-sport Athlete of the Week, are at /usa/delaware/. The national directory of high school fan-vote polls is at /usa/.