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

What the Daily Leader Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

This program hands a weekly honor to a high school athlete, and readers alone decide who receives it. The organizer is The Daily Leader, a newspaper published under the domain pontiacdailyleader.com, and its coverage area centers on Pontiac, Illinois together with the smaller communities of Lexington, Dwight, Cornell, Gridley and Woodland. Those towns supply the schools whose athletes appear on the weekly ballots, which is also how the program's Illinois placement is corroborated.

Crowdsignal, the company behind the poll.fm polling service, supplies the balloting. The current ballot address is https://poll.fm/15971884, and that page carries the latest ballot in the series rather than a permanent program home. Each week the newspaper selects a group of standout athletes, posts them as poll answers, and invites readers to pick a winner.

The vertical is school sport, and the mechanic is a plain public poll: no entry fee, no nomination form for readers, just a list of named options. The table below gathers the fixed points a reader needs.

The dated facts: editions, the weekly window and what is not published

Three confirmed editions exist, dated 2023, 2024 and 2025. The series returns each school year, but within a season it moves week by week: ballots appear one after another through the school-year months of September through June, and the 2026 cycle is the next expected run.

The clearest dated window attached to the program is a published call for votes that fixed one week's round at March 17-22. That is a sample of the rhythm, not a calendar: the newspaper posts no standing schedule of open and close dates for every weekly ballot, and no platform round dates exist for this market either. The date of the next ballot is simply not posted in advance.

The most recent closed ballot in the series shows how a week resolves. Its leading option finished at 53 percent, 7,330 votes in all, well ahead of the runner-up at 23 percent with 3,226 votes. Those figures belong to that one week's poll and say nothing about any other week.

On the unpublished side, the ballot page prints no category list and names no sports for any given week; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No eligibility criteria appear alongside the ballot either, so who qualifies for a given week is visible only from the nominee list itself.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

The steps themselves are short. A supporter loads the poll.fm ballot, reads the nominee list, which pairs high school athletes with their schools and towns such as Pontiac, Lexington, Dwight, Cornell, Gridley and Woodland, picks one option and submits the form. No account is required, and the ballot page describes no write-in step.

The governing rule comes from the publisher's own call for votes, which caps participation at a single vote per person per day. That is the only vote rule attached to the program. It means anyone wishing to vote repeatedly through a week returns on separate days rather than submitting several times from the same visit.

Timing matters because each ballot covers a single week. The representative ballot at https://poll.fm/15971884 is already marked closed, with its results displayed as percentages and vote totals, so a visitor arriving there today is looking at a finished round. The live round for the current week sits at whatever fresh poll.fm address the newspaper's latest call-for-votes post points to.

Because the ballot itself prints nothing beyond the daily limit, a supporter curious about anything else, whether that is how ties are handled or when results are announced, has to read it off the live ballot rather than assume it carries over from week to week.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

Several Illinois reader-vote sports programs share this space, and the neighbours make its shape easier to see. The Herald-News Joliet Athlete of the Week runs the same weekly athlete-of-the-week format for a different newspaper market, while the Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week and the Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week are other publisher-run weekly ballots in the state.

A second cluster is the year-end awards: the Illinois SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year, the Illinois SI Football Class 1A Player of the Year and the Illinois SI Football Class 4A Player of the Year are seasonal player-of-the-year votes rather than weekly honours.

What sets the Daily Leader program apart is its scale and its cadence. It is a small-market newspaper ballot, tied to Pontiac and the towns around it, that refreshes every week through the school year instead of crowning a single season winner. That gives a local athlete many short windows of attention across a year rather than one long campaign, and it means each week's result, like the recent closed poll where the leader took 53 percent of 7,330 votes, stands entirely on its own.

Strengthening support for a Daily Leader nominee

Momentum for a nominee here comes from repetition inside the rules. The publisher caps voting at a single vote per person per day, so the strongest legitimate action is a daily return through the voting week: a family, a team or a student section that votes once each day multiplies its impact without touching the limit. The second lever is reach. The newspaper announces each week's ballot through its own sports coverage, so sharing that call-for-votes post with the school community reaches the people most likely to vote.

On outside assistance the organizer says little: the ballot page carries no policy on organized vote gathering, and no eligibility or anti-manipulation text appears beside the poll. That silence is not permission; it simply marks an absence of published rules, and the practical reading is that votes which look like ordinary daily participation are the ones the format was designed to count.

For a broader view of what works across public-vote programs of this shape, see this site's guide to getting more votes online, and for award-style ballots specifically the award votes page covers the category.