Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Not Illinois' only weekly athlete ballot, but a separate one entirely

Illinois runs more than one newspaper-hosted athlete-of-the-week vote. The Daily Chronicle's DeKalb County edition answers to none of them: a different web address, a different set of nominees each week, and a Tuesday close that belongs only to this county's own count.

The Dekalb Daily Chronicle hosts this program at dekalbdailychronicle.secondstreetapp.com. Three seasons are confirmed so far, 2024-25 through 2026-27, and the live week right now is Week 3, open September 13 through September 15, 2026. The page itself states that voting ends Tuesday at noon.

Past the Tuesday-noon close and the week's own dates, the page prints nothing further; whatever a supporter needs beyond that belongs on the live ballot itself.

Three seasons of weeks, building toward this Tuesday's close

Rather than a single yearly ballot, DeKalb County Athlete of the Week resets every week, and three full seasons of that pattern are now confirmed: 2024-25, 2025-26 and 2026-27. Week 2 of the current season already opened September 6 and runs through September 8, ahead of Week 3's own September 13 through September 15 stretch, showing the series moving from one numbered week straight into the next.

DeKalb, the seat of DeKalb County in northern Illinois, is where the Daily Chronicle's own newsroom sits, covering the county's high schools through this weekly format rather than a single end-of-year vote.

Tuesday at noon is the one standing rule the page actually prints. Everything else, a category breakdown, a per-voter limit, whether a household with several devices counts more than once, stays off the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle for whichever week happens to be open.

A three-season run is still a young one next to some of the decade-old ballots other Illinois newsrooms carry. That does not make DeKalb County's own weekly vote any less real to the athletes and schools it recognizes each Tuesday; it simply means fewer past weeks exist for anyone to study before deciding how a given week is likely to play out.

How this compares with Illinois' other newspaper athlete ballots

Several Illinois newsrooms run a similar weekly or seasonal format, and none of them feed results into DeKalb County's own count.

A DeKalb County athlete named on the Daily Chronicle's own ballot gains no standing on any of the six programs above, and a strong week on one of the statewide ballots carries nothing back to DeKalb County either. Searching loosely for an Illinois athlete-of-the-week vote can easily land on any one of these seven addresses.

Working within a Tuesday deadline instead of a season-long campaign

A weekly format leaves little room to plan far ahead; the practical move is lining up who will actually visit dekalbdailychronicle.secondstreetapp.com before Tuesday noon and returning them to the page more than once inside that short window, since three days is the entire runway this format gives a supporter.

That holds true whatever per-voter number the page eventually prints. Genuine visitors, asked directly during the open days, decide a short weekly vote like this one far more reliably than any workaround. Second Street's own systems are built to notice patterns that do not look like ordinary supporters clicking a link, and a flag on a program only three seasons deep costs a nominee more standing than the same flag would cost on an older ballot.

A Week 3 win settles nothing about how the Daily Chronicle eventually handles the rest of the 2026-27 season, a decision that stays entirely the newspaper's own. Is buying votes legal separates an ordinary supporter push from one that crosses into real risk, worth reading before spending real effort on a later week. Buying votes online covers what outside support for a straight weekly vote typically involves, and sports fan poll vote support is built around a school-sports ballot shaped the way this one is.