IndyStar Swimmer of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the IndyStar Swimmer of the Week and who runs it?

IndyStar Swimmer of the Week is a recurring reader honor that The Indianapolis Star (IndyStar) hangs on its Indiana high-school swimming coverage. Each ballot asks a solitary question, who deserves the week's recognition, and pairs every nominee with her or his high-school program, drawing the slate from that week's meets across central Indiana communities.

The newspaper behind it is The Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis-based daily whose masthead readers know as IndyStar. Its sports desk assembles the nominee list, publishes the ballot alongside its high-school swimming stories, and the outcome surfaces on the poll page once the count stops.

The ballot itself sits away from the newspaper's domain. IndyStar publishes its reader polls on Crowdsignal, the service whose ballots occupy poll.fm addresses, and the swimming vote lives at poll.fm/14952407. That separation matters to supporters: the voting interface, the running tally and the closed-poll notice all come from the polling service, while the nominees, the weekly schedule and the editorial framing come from IndyStar.

The program at a glance

The shape of the season frames everything else on this page: the honor recurs weekly while swimmers are competing rather than arriving as a single yearly event, and the vote welcomes any reader who reaches the ballot, with no payment involved in casting it.

Which editions and dates are confirmed for the IndyStar swimming vote?

Confirmed editions of the IndyStar Swimmer of the Week vote ran in 2024 and 2025, which marks the program as a recurring annual feature rather than a fleeting promotion. Within those runs the ballot keeps a weekly rhythm: each installment carries its own date range in its title, in the pattern of the January ballot that asked who deserved the honor for Jan. 13-18.

That January installment has since ended. IndyStar's article language for the swimming polls sets a consistent cutoff: the vote stays open until noon Sunday. Once the clock passes that mark, the poll flips to a closed status and the standings hold firm.

The final count on that January ballot left no ambiguity about the outcome. The leading nominee took 53 percent of the vote on 36,271 individual votes, while the runner-up finished at 38 percent on 26,160 votes. Finishing positions behind the top pair were displayed on the poll page too, giving readers a complete accounting of the week's race.

What the ballot does not publish

Other gaps are narrower. The poll page does not lay out a season-wide calendar of coming installments, and no eligibility text travels with the nominee list. Both of those belong to IndyStar's editorial operation rather than to the ballot surface, so readers chasing precision should lean on the newspaper's weekly story that introduces each new slate.

How does a supporter vote in the IndyStar swimming poll today?

The act of voting takes a minute. Start at poll.fm/14952407, open the live ballot, read the nominee slate, mark the selection beside the preferred swimmer, and submit. The page logs the choice and refreshes the running order. Nothing beyond the ballot itself stands between a reader and a completed vote.

Repeat participation is expressly welcomed. IndyStar's own instruction on its swimming ballots reads, "Read carefully, choose wisely and remember you have unlimited votes to decide who wins swimmer of the year!" That wording surfaced in the seasonal swimmer of the year race, and it signals how the publisher treats reader voting across its swimming coverage: the tally rewards sustained backing, so supporters who return day after day multiply their impact while staying squarely inside the rule as printed.

Nominations feed the ballot from outside the newsroom. IndyStar directs nomination emails to [email protected], so a coach, parent or teammate who believes a performance earned recognition can put a name forward instead of waiting for the editorial desk to notice it.

Practical notes for voting day

The polling service displays standings on the ballot page, so supporters can see where their pick sits and adjust their push accordingly. There is no separate results destination to hunt down; the same address that accepts votes also shows the count.

How does this swimming vote compare with other Indiana fan ballots?

Indiana's public-vote scene holds several long-running best-of ballots, and the IndyStar swimming honor occupies a distinct corner of it. Where the best-of contests ask readers to crown favorite local businesses and services, this ballot crowns a swimmer's week. Where those contests operate at citywide or countywide scale, this stretch of IndyStar's coverage follows a single sport across the state's high-school ranks.

The nearest neighbours on this site illustrate the spread. Best of Indiana runs at the whole-state level, while CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of, CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of and CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of tie their ballots to individual cities. YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of serves the South Bend market under a different banner, and Best of Elkhart County narrows to a lone county. Each of those programs aggregates many categories; the swimming vote poses a solitary weekly question with a solitary weekly winner.

The sharpest contrast for someone backing a nominee here is tempo. A best-of campaign builds over months of voting rounds, while a swimmer of the week push has only a handful of days to gather force before the Sunday cutoff. The underlying strategies overlap, yet the calendars barely do, and anyone promoting a nominee needs to plan around that compressed schedule.

How can a nominee's supporters build real momentum in this weekly vote?

Momentum in this ballot comes from timing and repetition. The published rule grants unlimited votes, so a committed base that returns every day outruns a larger group that votes once and drifts away. Share the poll.fm link the moment the week's story appears, and aim reminders at the stretch before the noon Sunday cutoff rather than after the race has frozen.

Nomination is the other lever a community controls: send standout performances to [email protected] early in the week so the editorial desk has them in hand before the slate settles. For supporters weighing outside help of any kind, the general playbook lives in our guide to getting more votes online; whatever tactic travels onto this ballot should respect the publisher's posted rules and the weekly rhythm that separates this honor from a seasonal best-of contest.