Ivy Tech Male Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Ivy Tech Male Athlete of the Week matters locally

This program is a high school sports ballot run by Ivy Tech Journal & Courier, the publication serving Lafayette and the surrounding Indiana communities. The towns the ballot itself carries include Delphi, Crawfordsville and Lafayette, and the nominated athletes come from schools such as Delphi, Faith Christian, Harrison and Lafayette Jeff. It is a community honour in the most literal sense: the families, classmates and local supporters of each nominee are the people who decide the result.

That community character shapes how the ballot behaves. The vote is a Crowdsignal poll published at poll.fm, a plain public ballot with no login requirement printed on the ballot page, which keeps the barrier to participation as low as possible for a Friday-night football crowd or a Tuesday-night basketball family. The publisher's own instruction is that you may vote as much as you would like, which turns the weekly poll into something closer to a sustained community effort than a single click.

The sponsorship structure also matters to readers. Ivy Tech, the community college whose name sits at the front of the program, sponsors the Journal & Courier's athlete of the week coverage, so the ballot doubles as a local-institution feature. For a nominee's school, a win is a shareable piece of recognition that travels through booster pages and school social accounts across the Lafayette area.

The dated record for the Ivy Tech Male Athlete of the Week

Two seasons of the program are confirmed: 2022 and 2025. That pair of edition years is what qualifies the ballot as an annual program rather than a one-off feature, and the next expected cycle is 2026. No years between 2022 and 2025 are confirmed for this award, so the honest description is a program with a confirmed 2022 season, a confirmed 2025 season, and a gap in between that the publisher has not documented.

The 2025 season carries the fuller paper trail. It was assembled from nine weekly ballots dated between October and January, which gives the program its season shape: a fall start, a run through the winter high school sports calendar, and a close in January. Each individual poll within that season follows the same weekly rhythm, staying open until 5 p.m. ET Friday before the next ballot replaces it.

The publisher has printed no category roster for the award itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The ballot page presents a single male athlete of the week question each week rather than a multi-category form, but any additional structure the organizer applies from season to season is not published alongside the vote.

One closed ballot does show how results are reported. On the representative poll, the leading nominee finished with 63 percent of 13,560 votes, the runner-up held 33 percent with 7,200 votes, and a third nominee carried 4 percent on 774 votes. Those published totals are the clearest public evidence of how seriously Lafayette-area supporters turn out for this ballot.

How to vote in the Ivy Tech Male Athlete of the Week poll today

The mechanic on the current Journal & Courier ballot is deliberately simple. Open the weekly poll on Crowdsignal at poll.fm, read the list of nominated male athletes paired with their schools, select the radio button next to your choice, and press the vote button. Nothing on the ballot page asks for an account, an email address or a login, so a Lafayette-area supporter can go from opening the link to a counted vote in under a minute.

The repeat-vote rule is the part most worth understanding. The publisher states that you may vote in this poll as much as you would like, and asks only that you refresh the page so each attempt counts. That wording, printed on the Journal & Courier's own coverage of the award, makes this one of the more permissive Indiana ballots: a family that wants to push a Delphi or Crawfordsville nominee can legitimately return every day of the voting window.

Timing is the other half of the mechanic. Each weekly poll stays open until 5 p.m. ET Friday, which means the effective deadline arrives on a weekday afternoon rather than at midnight. A supporter who plans to vote repeatedly across the week should treat Friday midday as the last safe window, because the ballot closes and the published percentages and vote totals appear once the poll is closed.

Because the series runs weekly from October through January, missing one ballot is not fatal to a nominee's season. Each week produces a fresh poll with a fresh nominee list, so momentum built in one week's vote carries into community attention for the next.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Within Indiana's public-vote landscape, the Ivy Tech Male Athlete of the Week occupies its own lane under its own publisher. The nearest neighbours include the Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week, a similar weekly format from a different Indiana newsroom, and the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week, which takes a statewide view of one sport.

Season-end awards sit alongside the weekly ones. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year both crown a single annual winner, while the Indiana SI Football 3A Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 4A Player of the Year split the football field by class. None of those programs shares a publisher with the Journal & Courier ballot.

What distinguishes the Ivy Tech Male Athlete of the Week within that set is its rhythm and its reach. It is one of the few that runs as a true weekly series, nine ballots deep in the 2025 season, and its nominee pool is drawn from the Lafayette-area schools the publication covers, including Delphi, Crawfordsville, Faith Christian, Harrison and Lafayette Jeff. Matching the program to the athlete is the sensible move: a Lafayette-area weekly nominee belongs here, while a statewide or class-specific award belongs on its own ballot.

Strengthening support within the Journal & Courier ballot's rules

Every honest push for a nominee in this program starts from the rule the publisher printed: you may vote as much as you would like, with a page refresh between attempts. That makes repetition the core tactic, and it is one the organizer explicitly permits. A nominee's supporters in Delphi, Crawfordsville or Lafayette can build a daily habit around the ballot rather than a single burst, and the 5 p.m. ET Friday close gives the week a clear rhythm to plan around.

The scale of the vote also shapes strategy. With the leading nominee on the representative poll drawing 13,560 votes, a handful of extra clicks from one household moves nothing; coordinated reminders across a school's parent groups, team chats and booster pages are what move a percentage point. The publisher has not printed any restriction on how supporters coordinate their repeat voting, only the refresh instruction.

What the ballot page does not do is describe any tolerance for automated voting tools, so the safe assumption is that the Journal & Courier expects votes cast by real people clicking the poll.fm page. General tactics that respect a public poll's mechanics are covered in how to get more votes online, and the background on paid participation sits at buy award votes.