Herald-Times Boys Athlete of the Week poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Herald-Times Boys Athlete of the Week poll is

Start with what makes this ballot unlike the other Indiana votes it gets grouped with. It is not an award spanning a whole season for one player and it is not a single-sport poll. The Herald-Times, the Indiana newspaper behind heraldtimesonline.com, posts a boys Athlete of the Week ballot as a weekly series during its high school sports coverage, and each edition mixes sports: the May 12-17 ballot drew nominees from track, baseball and golf on the same page.

The vote is hosted on Crowdsignal, the poll.fm service, and the working ballot address is poll.fm/15499249. The setup is a plain public vote, free to read and free to cast, with no registration step shown on the page. The publisher's companion vote, the Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week, is a programme run apart from this one, with a ballot of its own, so a vote cast on one never counts toward the other.

Facts at a glance

Everything a supporter needs sits on the ballot itself: the nominee list, each athlete's school and sport, and the vote control. The publisher's sports stories introduce each new edition and carry the window's closing time.

The dated record for this poll

Two edition years are confirmed for the programme, 2024 and 2025, and the poll is running again under the same name in the 2026 cycle. The series is weekly: each edition covers a date-range week, in the pattern of the May 12-17 ballot, and a new poll replaces the old one as the sports season moves along.

The newspaper's own story for the current window dates the close precisely: "The poll will be open until 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11." That is the one hard deadline on the page. Opening moments are not printed ahead of time, and the date of the next weekly ballot is not announced before its story runs.

Closed ballots do publish their outcomes. On the May 12-17 edition, the leading nominee finished at 36 percent on 2,738 votes, with the runner-up close behind at 32 percent, which shows the poll reports both share and raw count when a window ends.

No nomination window and no roster of standing categories for the boys ballot appear in the organizer's published material; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The sports represented change week to week with the schedule, so the nominee list itself is the only reliable guide to what a given edition covers.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Voting takes three steps and no account. A supporter brings up the ballot at poll.fm/15499249, reads a short list of nominees, each shown with a school and a sport, selects the button beside one name, and submits with the vote control at the bottom of the list. There is no login, no email step and no fee anywhere on the page.

The volume rule comes straight from the publisher: "As always, readers may vote as much as they like (just refresh the page each time) in our latest poll." That sentence does two things at once. It removes any per-person ceiling, and it names the exact action that produces repeat votes, refreshing the page and submitting again.

Because each edition is a fresh poll with a fresh nominee list, a supporter's work resets every week. Votes never carry over between editions, and the athlete on the current ballot is the only one a vote can help. When the window closes, the page switches to a closed display and shows the final standings with percentages and totals.

The practical rhythm during the season is therefore: find the new week's story on the newspaper's sports section, follow its ballot link, vote, refresh, and repeat until the stated closing time, which for the current window is 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Indiana has several reader votes in this space, and they differ from this one in scope and publisher. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week comes from the same publisher but is run as a programme apart, with a ballot of its own; this page covers only the boys-side poll. The Indiana High School Football Player of the Week is state-wide and single-sport, where this poll is a publisher's local multi-sport vote.

The player of the year awards sit further away still. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year is a different newspaper's season-capping award, while the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year, the Indiana SI Football 3A Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 4A Player of the Year are classification-based annual awards rather than weekly polls.

Three things set this ballot apart: it is weekly rather than annual in rhythm, it spans every boys sport the newspaper covers, and its volume rule is the most permissive wording in the group, an explicit invitation to vote as often as a reader likes. For a supporter choosing where to spend effort, that unlimited-voting rule is the single most important difference.

Strengthening support in a refresh-to-vote poll

This ballot rewards one behavior above all others, and the publisher says so openly: repeat voting. Because the stated rule lets readers vote as much as they like by refreshing the page, a nominee's total grows with every return visit, so the strongest campaigns organize real supporters, teammates, families and student sections, to cycle through the ballot during the open window rather than voting once and leaving.

Timing matters too. The current window closes at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11, and each weekly edition has its own close, so pushes work best in the final day before a deadline while the ballot is still open.

The organizer publishes no restriction beyond its unlimited-voting statement, and no purchase is involved in voting. For a fuller rundown of outreach that fits a free, refresh-based ballot like this one, see how to get more votes online, and for the broader legal picture see is buying votes legal.