Georgia High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters don't realize about this ballot

Most state fan-vote polls are sport-specific: a football player competes against other football players, a basketball player against other basketball players. Georgia's Athlete of the Week does not work that way. On December 2, 2024, SI posted a ballot with 19 nominees — and they were not all football players. Eleven football nominees shared the list with boys basketball players, girls basketball players, and a wrestler from Dutchtown. Every single vote cast for Tre'Sean Williams (wrestling) counted against Tyrese Woodgett (football, Coffee) and Alex Sanchez (football, Grayson) with no weight adjustment. The sport does not matter; the total count does.

That structure changes the math for any community trying to move a nominee. A basketball program whose sport draws fewer Georgia viewers in December is not disadvantaged by the ballot's design — it is competing on the same terms as a Gwinnett County football power. The question is not which sport is bigger; it is which community turns out more people before Sunday night.

The 12/2/2024 ballot also confirmed what the GHSA classification breakdown looks like in practice: Tallulah Falls (small private, northeast mountains), Holy Innocents' Golden Bears (small private, Atlanta suburbs), and Grayson (one of the state's largest public programs) all on one list. None of them drew a different playing field based on enrollment. That is the actual structure voters are walking into.

December 2, 2024: nineteen nominees, four sports, one vote

The confirmed field from 12/2/2024 gives the clearest picture of what this ballot looks like at its widest:

Eleven football, five boys basketball, three girls basketball, one wrestling. That ratio shifts week to week — in January and February, when football is over, basketball nominees will dominate. The core fact is constant: all sports vote on the same poll, and raw vote count determines the outcome regardless of which sport a nominee plays.

What the table also shows is the geographic spread. Toombs County (southeast Georgia), Jefferson (northeast corridor), Grayson (Gwinnett), Coffee (Douglas, south central), Cartersville (northwest), Coahulla Creek (far northwest Walker County), Tallulah Falls (mountain northeast) — this is a genuinely statewide ballot, not a metro-Atlanta ballot wearing a state label. A tight-knit community anywhere in Georgia starts on equal footing.

Sunday at 11:59 — the one deadline that governs everything

The Georgia Athlete of the Week closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — confirmed from the 12/2/2024 poll. That is 2:59 a.m. Eastern Monday for Georgia voters, meaning Sunday night is the real close. There is no Monday window here, unlike the SI regional polls in some other states.

That Sunday deadline compresses the useful voting hours. A poll that opens after Saturday's games gives campaigns roughly 24–36 hours from nomination to close. The most productive window is Saturday evening (when the article goes live and supporters first see their nominee) and Sunday afternoon before the 11:59 p.m. cutoff. A single Saturday-night message to the team group chat, followed by one Sunday reminder in the afternoon, covers both peaks.

Because the ballot runs across all sports simultaneously, there is no natural "football community vs. basketball community" split in strategy — every sport's supporters are voting in the same race. A wrestling program from Dutchtown that sends a Sunday morning message to its booster group is competing on the same clock as a football powerhouse from Gwinnett. The sport-agnostic structure of this poll is also its leveling mechanism: reach matters more than sport prestige, and Sunday afternoon is when most of that reach converts.

For a full picture of Georgia's other weekly polls — the sport-specific Defensive Football POTW and Boys and Girls Basketball POTW that run alongside this one — see /usa/georgia/. The national directory of all state fan-vote polls is at /usa/. For the general mechanics of how weekly fan votes work and what drives outcomes on SI-style polls, the how-to guide covers the cadence step by step.