Rockford Register Star Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Seven goals in one game, and what 34% means in a nine-name field

The sharpest starting point for this poll is Kendall Zanoni's week. Zanoni, a Harlem High School soccer player, scored 7 goals in a single game during the week of March 31–April 5, 2025 — a school record. Over six games in that stretch, the total climbed to 16. The Register Star put Zanoni on the ballot alongside eight other nominees. She won with over 34% of the vote.

Thirty-four percent in a nine-person field does not sound like a landslide, but it is. Eight candidates shared the remaining 66%, meaning no single rival came close. What that split reveals is the decisive variable in the Register Star poll: in a capped system where each device votes once per day, the winner is usually the nominee whose community showed up consistently across all five days — not the one whose fans voted most on Monday morning and then stopped.

The rest of the ballot that week illustrates how wide the school pool runs. Belvidere North had three nominees: Ben Bucher in track (100 meters, 10.96 seconds, third-fastest in Illinois that spring), Jesse Kramer (800 meters, 1:57.12, fastest in the state at the time), and Isabelle Schadle in softball (4-for-4 with a home run, two doubles, and a .500 average). Auburn's Maylee Baker was nominated for three home runs across two softball games. Oregon had both a softball and a baseball nominee. A school from one side of the metro running against a school from the other — that is a normal Register Star ballot. For the general mechanics of how weekly prep fan votes work, the how-to guide covers the shared patterns across capped and uncapped polls.

The community map between Harlem and Freeport

Rockford's prep sports identity runs through Winnebago County and into the smaller communities west toward Freeport, south toward Stillman Valley, and north into Boone County where Belvidere sits. The Register Star covers all of it. That geographic spread matters for the poll because the schools represent very different community types.

Harlem, Auburn, Hononegah, and Guilford are larger Rockford-adjacent programs with substantial current-student and alumni populations. Oregon, Stillman Valley, and Winnebago are smaller-enrollment schools in more rural areas, where the student body may be smaller but the school is often the organizing center of the community. Freeport sits to the west, closer to the Iowa border than to Chicago, with its own distinct fan base.

In a per-day capped poll, the size advantage of the larger schools only matters if those fans actually vote each day. A small-town program that puts a reminder in the right group chat every morning — the team parents, the boosters, the coaches themselves — can maintain daily vote volume that a larger school with diffuse social networks struggles to match. Belvidere North placed two nominees in one spring week, and both were at the top of statewide track rankings; that kind of measurable achievement draws voters beyond the immediate school family.

That is the structural reality of this poll. It rewards organized communities, not just large ones.

How the cap and the Friday close work together

The Register Star is explicit: one vote per device per day. The poll opens early in the week after nominations close Monday at 10 a.m., and it runs until Friday at noon.

That Monday deadline on nominations is worth noting. A player who had an exceptional Friday-night or Saturday performance needs someone to flag it by Monday morning at the latest. Missing the nomination window means sitting out the week regardless of how strong the performance was.

Once the ballot is live, the per-day cap means that each day of the window carries equal weight. A campaign that activates its network only on Tuesday and goes quiet by Wednesday has spent most of its potential. The five-day window is five separate vote opportunities per device — treating it like one single moment leaves most of those on the table.

For context on how this compares to other Illinois prep polls, the full state picture is at /usa/illinois/, and the broader national directory lives at /usa/. A campaign that needs to sustain daily reach across multiple devices over the full five-day window is a different problem than an uncapped weekly poll — the daily reset means the goal is consistent people, not peak volume from a few sources.