The Courier & Press High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The program, its publisher and where the vote lives

Each week during the Indiana high school sports season, the Courier & Press sports desk assembles a fresh nominee list and hands the choice to its readers. The award, presented by Orthopaedic Associates, honors a standout performer from the newspaper's southwestern Indiana coverage area, and recent slates have drawn athletes from Evansville, Jasper, Princeton, Tecumseh, Mount Vernon and Boonville, which is also how the program's Indiana footprint is corroborated.

The vote runs on poll.fm, the Crowdsignal-hosted voting service, and the current ballot lives at poll.fm/16502580. Because the series is weekly, that address holds the newest edition rather than a single fixed contest: each new week brings a new nominee slate and a fresh count, so the URL a supporter saves today is the same one that carries next week's race.

Any visitor can read the short performance notes under each nominee and cast a ballot without signing in, and once a poll closes the page displays the outcome as percentages alongside raw vote totals. That transparency helps supporters in a practical way: it shows exactly how far behind a campaign sits and how much ground a push must cover before the Friday-morning cutoff arrives.

Facts at a glance

Editions, the voting window and what stays unpublished

The 2023, 2024 and 2025 seasons all produced confirmed editions, which makes the program an annual Courier & Press fixture, with the next expected cycle in 2026. Within each season the cadence is weekly, and voting across those seasons falls between November and February, matching the heart of the Indiana high school sports year.

The publisher prints no precise open or closing dates for individual weekly ballots and publishes no roster of the sports the award rotates through; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Planning around a specific week therefore means watching the live page rather than relying on any published schedule, because the ballot replaces itself weekly without a printed calendar of editions.

Closed ballots do reveal scale. One recent edition finished with its leading nominee at 62 percent on 25,312 votes, while the runner-up held 15 percent on 6,125 votes. Those figures come straight from the ballot page and show how lopsided a single week can become when one school community votes persistently. They also confirm the poll displays raw totals beside percentages, so the size of any gap stays visible to anyone watching the race, and a trailing campaign always knows the exact number it must close.

Casting a vote in the weekly Courier & Press ballot

Voting takes no special access. The publisher's printed instruction on the ballot invites supporters to vote as many times as they wish before the 10 a.m. CT Friday cutoff. In practice a supporter opens the live poll at poll.fm/16502580, reads the short summary beneath each nominee, selects one athlete and submits. The choice registers immediately on the Crowdsignal ballot.

Because repeat voting is invited within the week, the practical lever is rhythm rather than volume in one sitting. A ballot cast Monday can be repeated Tuesday and again Wednesday, while anything remembered after the Friday-morning cutoff counts for nothing until the next edition. Supporters backing an athlete in Evansville, Jasper, Princeton, Tecumseh, Mount Vernon or Boonville do best when their school community treats the poll as a daily habit across the whole week rather than a single late push.

The ballot sets no per-visitor ceiling beyond that Friday deadline, and it publishes no eligibility rule saying who may vote. When a poll closes, results stay visible with percentages and raw counts, so a supporter can see how the week's race finished before the next slate replaces it. Missing a week carries no penalty; the following edition simply opens fresh with a new list of nominees.

Indiana neighbours of this weekly athlete ballot

The Courier & Press weekly award sits among several Indiana public-vote high school sports ballots, and knowing the neighbours keeps rules from being mixed up across programs. The closest sibling from the same publisher is the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year, a season-ending ballot rather than a weekly one, so its window and rules are its own.

Elsewhere in the state, the Bloomington Herald-Times runs a comparable weekly newspaper format in a different market, while the statewide Indiana football player of the week ballot operates at statewide scale. The Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 3A and 4A Player of the Year ballots round out the set, each answering to its own organizer.

What distinguishes the Courier & Press program is its cadence and breadth: weekly rather than seasonal, spanning all high school sports rather than one, and anchored to one newspaper's southwestern Indiana coverage area rather than the whole state. A vote cast here counts for nothing on any of the other ballots, and each program's window must be read from its own page before a supporter plans a push.

Building support within the weekly reset

This program's structure rewards consistency more than any single burst. The ballot resets weekly and closes at 10 a.m. CT Friday, so support built for one week's slate must be rebuilt for the next, and a campaign that starts late forfeits most of the repeat-voting room the publisher explicitly allows. Supporters who move these polls treat Monday through Thursday as the working window and Friday morning as a hard wall.

The organizer's printed rule frames any push: repeat voting is invited, and nothing further about outside assistance appears on the ballot page. That makes the honest levers obvious. Share the poll link directly with the athlete's school community, post it where team families already gather, and remind people that a vote cast today can be cast again tomorrow until the cutoff. Results are public, so momentum is visible, and a visible gap can rally late voters who might otherwise assume the race is settled.

For supporters weighing outside help, the honest starting points are this page's facts about the ballot and the general guides: how to get more votes online covers outreach suited to a weekly poll, and the award-votes page explains the purchasing category in general terms. Neither changes what the Courier & Press ballot permits, which is the Friday-morning repeat-vote rule and nothing more.