Ivy Tech Journal & Courier Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the Ivy Tech Journal & Courier Football Player of the Week

The Ivy Tech Journal & Courier Football Player of the Week hands Lafayette-area readers a weekly say in the Journal & Courier's high school football coverage. The Journal & Courier, the daily newspaper covering Lafayette and the surrounding Indiana scene, runs the poll with Ivy Tech as the presenting sponsor. Each week during the season the paper shortlists a handful of standout performers from Friday games around the Lafayette area and gives the choice to its readers.

The audience is the paper's own high school sports readership: families, classmates, booster groups and local football followers who already read the Journal & Courier's coverage on jconline.com. That community-first shape is what makes the poll competitive. A nominee's total reflects how many people a school can mobilise in a few days, not a panel of judges, so organised fan turnout decides the winner every week.

The paper runs the voting on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), the same balloting platform many Gannett newspapers use for their player of the week series. The live ballot lives at poll.fm/16057969, and the paper links it from its weekly high school football story. Because the series is weekly, the nominee list changes every cycle while the mechanics stay the same.

The dated facts behind the Journal & Courier player of the week series

Ballots from this series are confirmed for 2018, 2023 and 2025, and the series is running again for the 2026 season. The voting window falls in September and October, tracking the Indiana high school football calendar, with each weekly poll opening after the Friday games and closing midweek.

The most precisely dated fact on the current ballot is its close: the poll remains open until 5 p.m. ET Thursday, Sept. 3, and the paper's story states plainly that you are allowed to vote as many times as you would like. That unlimited-voting sentence is the single most useful rule a supporter can know, because it means repeated voting is sanctioned by the organizer rather than worked around.

What the Journal & Courier has not published is a standing set of rules for the series: no printed category roster beyond the weekly football ballot, no stated eligibility criteria for nominees, and no written statement of how the winner is honoured beyond the poll result. The exact opening moment of each new weekly ballot is likewise not announced in advance on a fixed schedule; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Anyone planning a push can read this history simply. The series has returned across multiple seasons, the weekly rhythm is reliable during the fall, and the only deadline that matters in any given week is the Thursday afternoon close printed on that week's ballot story.

How to vote in the poll.fm ballot for the Journal & Courier football poll

Voting takes under a minute. Head to poll.fm/16057969, the current weekly poll in the Journal & Courier series. The page shows that week's nominees, each listed with their Lafayette-area school. Pick the nominee you back, tap the vote control, and the poll registers your choice immediately and shows the running tally.

Because the paper allows unlimited voting, the winning strategy is repetition plus reach. Return to the ballot each day before the close, and ask everyone in your school's orbit to do the same. The ballot prints no login requirement, so nothing stands between a supporter and the vote button except the deadline itself.

That deadline is the one hard edge in the mechanic. The current poll closes at 5 p.m. ET Thursday, Sept. 3, and once a weekly poll closes it stops accepting votes for good. A push that lands on Friday, after the close, helps nobody; a push that lands Wednesday night and Thursday morning catches the poll while it still counts.

Nomination works differently from voting. To get a player onto a future ballot, the paper asks for names and statistics for the week, emailed by Sunday after each game day to the sports address it prints, covering football in the Lafayette area. The Journal & Courier's sports desk then builds the nominee list for the following week's poll from those submissions.

How this Lafayette ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Indiana has an unusually dense field of newspaper-run fan polls, and the Journal & Courier's series is the Lafayette-area entry in it. Its closest structural cousin is the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week, which covers the sport statewide, while the Journal & Courier poll stays focused on schools around Lafayette and is sponsored by Ivy Tech.

Other siblings run on different rhythms and publishers. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week serves the Bloomington market, and the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year is a season-end award rather than a weekly poll. Postseason programmes such as the Indiana SI Football 3A Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 4A Player of the Year sort nominees by class, and the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year moves the same format to winter sport.

What distinguishes the Journal & Courier poll among these Indiana programmes is its weekly cadence plus its unlimited-voting rule. A statewide ballot spreads attention across hundreds of schools; a Lafayette-area ballot concentrates the same energy on a handful of nominees, which is why local turnout swings the result so sharply from week to week.

Strengthening support in the Journal & Courier weekly poll

Support in this series is built on two assets the ballot itself hands you: unlimited voting and a short, fixed window. The Journal & Courier states that unlimited voting is allowed before the 5 p.m. ET Thursday close, so a school community that votes daily, and reminds its people again on Thursday morning, is operating entirely inside the organizer's stated rules.

Ground the push locally. The nominee list is drawn from Lafayette area schools, so the natural base is the school's own families, student sections, youth football feeds and alumni groups. A message that names the player, the school and the Thursday deadline travels further than a generic plea, and a Wednesday-evening reminder catches everyone who missed the first ask.

On outside help, the organizer has printed no policy specific to this series, so the safe reading is the ballot's own terms: unlimited voting is allowed, and nothing else about vote sourcing is addressed. Anyone considering paid support can read the neutral overview at buying award votes first, and should keep in mind that a newspaper tally is never something any outside service can promise to beat.