Who is the Rockford Register Star's Female Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Female Athlete of the Year ballot is and who runs it

The Rockford Register Star is the daily newspaper for Rockford, Illinois, and its high school sports desk uses reader polls to let the community weigh in on local athletics. One of those polls asks a single question: who is the paper's Female Athlete of the Year? It is an award decided by public vote, not by a panel of sportswriters, so the outcome depends entirely on how many supporters each nominee can rally.

The ballot sits on Crowdsignal, a polling service with its home at the poll.fm address. The confirmed 2025 poll ran under poll number 15637671 and carried the header "Who is the Rockford Register Star's Female Athlete of the Year (Poll Closed)", meaning the page now shows final standings rather than accepting answers. Each option on that ballot paired an athlete's name with her school, drawing nominees from high schools around the Rockford area in northern Illinois.

Since the ballot names high school students, the program is described by its publisher, its platform and its market rather than by individual athletes. The schools named on the 2025 option list, including Rockford Christian, Guilford, Hononegah, Belvidere North, Stillman Valley and Byron, place the ballot firmly in the Rockford Register Star's coverage territory.

Key facts at a glance

The dated timeline: which editions are confirmed and what is not published

Two editions of this program are documented: 2023 and 2025. The 2025 ballot is the one whose page details survive in full, with the June timing and the closed status visible on the poll itself. The 2023 edition establishes that the paper has run this question in more than one year, which is why the program reads as an annual fixture of the Register Star's sports calendar rather than a single experiment.

The timing evidence for the 2025 cycle places the ballot in June, with the month of June as both the start and end of the observed window. That makes early summer, just after the spring sports season ends, the natural slot for the vote. Readers planning around the next edition should treat June as the month to watch, since both confirmed cycles land there.

Several facts sit outside what the publisher has printed. The poll page carries no dated open and close dates, no description of how nominees are chosen, and no text stating whether a reader may vote once or return repeatedly. The publisher also does not publish a promotion calendar entry for this market, so the platform round dates have never been laid out in one place. Anyone who needs the exact nomination and voting schedule, the list of categories beyond the single question, or the eligibility and vote-cap rules should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the June ballot

The mechanic is as simple as a public poll gets. A supporter opens the ballot on poll.fm, reads the single question, and selects one nominee from the list of options. Each option pairs a name with a school, so a voter from Byron can find the Byron nominee, a voter from Stillman Valley can find theirs, and supporters of Rockford's city schools can sort through the Rockford Christian and Guilford entries. After the selection is made, the vote is submitted and Crowdsignal typically displays a results bar showing how each option stands.

The 2025 poll page ends in a closed state, so visiting the numbered link today shows final standings rather than a live form. That is normal for a Crowdsignal ballot once its window ends, and it means a supporter who arrives outside June needs the fresh link for the current cycle, which the Rockford Register Star publishes through its own channels at rrstar.com.

What the form does not say matters just as much. Nothing on the page states whether the same reader can vote again the next day, whether votes from shared networks are filtered, or whether the paper audits the results before naming a winner. The final standings shown on the 2025 page gave the leading option 25 percent of the vote, a figure built from 3,643 votes, which gives a sense of scale: the outcome was decided by a few thousand participating readers, not tens of thousands. A campaign that moves the needle therefore needs a real slice of the local community, which is why sharing the link through team chats and school groups during the June window is the tactic the format rewards.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

Illinois readers have no shortage of publisher-run athlete polls, and this one occupies a specific niche: a single end-of-season question about female athletes, run by one newspaper for its own circulation area. Other programs on this site work differently. The Herald-News Joliet Athlete of the Week runs on a weekly rhythm for the Joliet market, and the Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week gives a downstate paper a similar weekly reader vote.

The Register Star's ballot differs from those weekly series in cadence and scope. Rather than naming a fresh honoree every seven days, it asks one question about the whole year and settles it in June. That makes the June window the entire campaign season: a school community that misses the month has missed the vote, while a weekly poll offers a new chance each cycle. The Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week covers a neighbouring county with the weekly shape, so Rockford's end-of-year format stands out among nearby options.

Statewide honors follow yet another pattern. Illinois SI runs reader ballots that span the whole state, among them a boys basketball honor and two football honors, one for Class 1A and one for Class 4A. Those votes draw supporters from all over Illinois rather than from a single newspaper's readership. Against that field, the Register Star's Female Athlete of the Year is the hyperlocal, all-sport, end-of-season honor for Rockford area girls, which is exactly why its June poll draws its few thousand votes from a tight-knit community.