The News-Press Athlete of the Week Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in this poll and why it matters locally

This program is a reader award for high school sports in the Fort Myers and Naples area of Florida, run by The News-Press together with the Naples Daily News. Rather than handing the honor to an editorial panel, the two newspapers put each week's standout performers in front of their audience and let readers decide. That makes the people doing the voting as important as the athletes on the ballot: the vote is a measure of which school community can rally its families, teammates and fans behind one name.

The coverage area behind the poll is the Fort Myers and Naples corridor. The publisher's own reporting draws nominees from schools in Fort Myers, Cape Coral, North Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Estero and Gateway, so a typical week's ballot mixes athletes from across Lee and Collier county communities. A family in Estero and a booster group in Cape Coral are voting on the same poll in the same window.

The vote sits on Crowdsignal, at poll.fm, a polling platform newspapers have used for reader ballots for years. The voting URL on this page points to the latest poll in the series. Because a new ballot is posted every school week, the poll a reader sees in October is a different page from the one in April, even though the address pattern and the host stay the same.

For anyone studying how Florida reader awards work, this poll sits alongside other regional ballots such as the Central Florida High School Football Player of the Week, which follows a similar public-vote format in a different part of the state.

The dated record of the series

The series has a long confirmed history. Ten seasons are confirmed, running from 2016 through 2025 without a gap, which makes this one of the longest continuously documented reader polls in the region. The poll is weekly during the school year, so each of those seasons produced a long run of individual ballots rather than a single annual event.

The weekly rhythm is fixed and stated by the publisher. Voting runs Monday through Thursday, and the poll closes at 10 a.m. Thursday each week, with the winner revealed afterward through the publishers' channels. Nominations work on a Sunday deadline: a nomination email with the athlete's name, the school and significant statistics must arrive by 5 p.m. Sunday to be considered for the coming week.

One dated example shows the shape of an individual ballot. A poll covering May 5-10 is recorded as closed, and its results page showed a leading nominee holding 31 percent of the vote, with the runner-up at 26 percent and the third-place finisher at 23 percent. Those figures illustrate how close weekly races in this series can run, and how much a concentrated push before the Thursday morning close can matter.

What the publisher has not printed on the ballot page is the list of ballot categories for any given week, so the exact sports and groupings in play should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The next season is expected in 2026, consistent with the series running every school year since it began.

How a supporter votes this week

The mechanic is deliberately simple, because a newspaper poll wants the widest possible participation from readers who may vote once and never return. A supporter opens the current poll on Crowdsignal, reads the nominee list, selects one athlete and submits. No account, payment or registration is involved on the poll page itself.

Timing is the one constraint that matters. The window runs Monday through Thursday, and votes cast after 10 a.m. Thursday arrive too late for that week's result. A supporter organizing votes for an athlete should therefore treat Wednesday evening as the practical deadline, leaving room for anyone who forgets until the last morning.

Nomination is a separate act from voting. To get an athlete onto a future ballot, a nominator emails the sports desk with the athlete's name, the school and significant statistics for the week, and the email must arrive by 5 p.m. Sunday. The editors choose the final nominee list from those submissions, so nomination is a suggestion the publisher acts on rather than an automatic entry.

The poll page does not print a rule on how often a single reader may vote in a week, so a supporter planning repeat votes should check the live ballot and the publisher's stated rules rather than assume a daily pattern. For broader tactics that apply to weekly reader ballots of this kind, see how to get more votes online.

How this ballot sits beside its Florida neighbours

The Fort Myers area's poll is one of several public-vote athlete awards on this site, and the differences between them are mostly about geography and sport rather than mechanics. The News-Press ballot covers the Fort Myers and Naples corridor and spans high school sports generally, taking a new nominee list every week of the school year. Its closest structural cousins on this site cover Central Florida, each tied to a single sport.

Those neighbours include the Central Florida Flag Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Baseball Player of the Week, and the Central Florida High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week. Each is a weekly public vote like this one, but each narrows to one sport, while The News-Press poll rotates across whatever performances stood out that week.

Two more siblings round out the set: the Central Florida High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week and the Central Florida High School Girls Flag Football Player of the Week. A supporter comparing them will find the same broad shape everywhere: a publisher posts nominees, readers vote on a hosted poll, and the winner is announced when the window closes.

What makes the News-Press version distinctive is its publisher pair and its breadth. Two newspapers share the byline, the coverage area spans multiple Florida communities, and the ballot crosses sports rather than fixing on one, which means the size and composition of the nominee list can change substantially from week to week.