The NWF Daily News Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the NWF Daily News Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

Published by the NWF Daily News, a daily newspaper serving northwest Florida, this Athlete of the Week program recognizes high school sports standouts through a reader ballot. Each week the paper selects a slate of standout high school athletes from schools in its coverage area and posts a public ballot where readers choose the week's winner. Readers pick one nominee and submit; there is no entry fee, no judging panel and no nomination form for the public to fill in. The nominee list is set by the paper's sports staff, and the audience decides the outcome.

The poll.fm service from Crowdsignal carries the ballot, the survey platform behind a large share of newspaper and school-district polls in the United States. The round on file at poll.fm/14662549 covered Nov. 11-16 and is marked closed. That round listed four nominees: athletes from Niceville, South Walton, Choctaw and Walton. When the poll closed, the Niceville nominee led with 62 percent, the South Walton nominee held 37 percent, and the remaining split went to the Choctaw and Walton nominees.

The paper's coverage area reaches communities including Destin, Crestview, Navarre, Freeport and Paxton, so the nominee slate rotates across those school communities through the year. Key program details are gathered in the table below.

The dated record: seasons, windows and what the paper has not printed

Four seasons of the NWF Daily News Athlete of the Week are confirmed: 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. The series is weekly in shape, meaning each season is built from many short ballots rather than one long annual window, and each ballot carries its own date range in its title. The most recent round on file is titled for Nov. 11-16 and is closed, with its final percentage tally displayed on the page. That dated title is the anchor for the whole series: every other week of every season follows the same pattern of a dated window, a nominee list and a closing tally.

Because the series is weekly, the calendar question readers actually have is narrower than when the contest runs. The paper posts a new poll for each stretch of days during the school year, and the date range sits in the poll title itself. What the NWF Daily News has not published anywhere on the ballot is the full season calendar, the nomination process behind each week's slate, or the dates of future rounds; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The same gap applies to the rules side of the poll. The ballot page for the Nov. 11-16 round carries no category roster beyond the single athlete question, states no ceiling on repeat voting, and prints no eligibility fine print. A reader who needs those details for the week now running has to read them off the live poll, because the paper does not carry them on the closed rounds either.

How a supporter votes on the current NWF Daily News ballot

Voting takes under a minute. The supporter opens the week's Crowdsignal ballot, reads the nominee list, selects one athlete and submits. The Nov. 11-16 round, the most recent ballot on file, demanded no registration, no email address and no sign-in of any kind. After submission, the page displays the running percentage split for that week's nominees, so a supporter immediately sees where their pick stands.

The nominee list is the only part of the ballot that changes week to week in shape. Each entry pairs an athlete's name with a school, as the Nov. 11-16 round paired its four nominees with Niceville, South Walton, Choctaw and Walton. A supporter looking for a particular school's athlete scans the list rather than browsing by category, because the poll asks a single question: who is the athlete of the week.

One practical point matters for anyone planning support. Each week's round is a separate poll with its own address on poll.fm, so a link saved from a previous week leads to a closed ballot, not the live one. The Nov. 11-16 page at poll.fm/14662549 shows the closed tally and the nominee list, which is useful for checking results but not for voting. The live round's address circulates through the paper's sports coverage and through the schools themselves each week. Supporters who want their vote to count should confirm the address on the live ballot each cycle rather than reusing an old link.

How this poll sits beside its Florida neighbours

The NWF Daily News Athlete of the Week belongs to a family of Florida high school sports polls, but it answers to a different publisher than the Central Florida programs. Six sibling ballots cover the Orlando-side market: the Central Florida Flag Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week and the Central Florida High School Girls Flag Football Player of the Week.

Two differences stand out. First, the NWF Daily News poll is sport-agnostic: any high school athlete in its northwest Florida coverage area, from Niceville to Paxton, can appear on a given week's slate, while each Central Florida sibling is tied to one sport and one gender where stated. Second, the geography does not overlap. The NWF Daily News serves the Panhandle communities of Destin, Crestview, Navarre, Freeport and Paxton, and the Central Florida programs serve a different set of schools entirely, so a nominee on one ballot will not appear on the other.

The upshot for anyone backing a nominee is that support strategies do not transfer automatically between the two markets. The Central Florida ballots draw on Orlando-area school communities, while this poll draws on Panhandle towns, and the weekly rhythm of the NWF Daily News series means a fresh audience every seven days rather than a season-long campaign for a single winner.

Strengthening support in a short weekly window

The defining constraint of this poll is time. A weekly ballot such as the Nov. 11-16 round gives supporters a few days, not a month, so the campaigns that move the percentage tally are the ones that start the morning the poll posts. The Niceville nominee's 62 percent finish in the round on file shows what concentrated school-community support does in a short window: a single well-mobilized fan base can dominate a four-nominee slate before the other schools organize.

The NWF Daily News has not printed a policy on organized vote support for this series, and the ballot page states no per-supporter cap, so the honest reading is that the paper relies on the Crowdsignal format itself. Whatever the current week's rules are, they live on that week's ballot. Supporters planning a push should read the live poll's text first, then work the channels that actually reach Panhandle sports fans: team parent groups, school social media accounts and alumni pages in Niceville, Destin, Crestview and the other coverage towns. For a broader playbook that fits short-window polls like this one, read how to get more votes online, and for the service side see buy award votes.