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

A ballot with a hard close and no printed start

The problem a nominee's family runs into with this award is simple: the close date is firm, the start date is not printed, and the window in between is where the whole contest is won. Evansville Courier & Press runs The Courier & Press Male High School Athlete of the Year as a public vote on Crowdsignal, hosted at poll.fm, and the publisher's promotional post carries the only deadline language that exists: voting stays open until 12 p.m. CT on Friday, July 3. Everything before that moment is open season under the rule the publisher did print, which allows voting as often as you'd like.

The award sits in the paper's prep sports coverage and is presented by Orthopaedic Associates, an Evansville-area orthopedic practice whose name appears in the ballot question itself. The nominees are male high school athletes from Indiana schools in the Courier & Press coverage area, and the winner is decided entirely by the fan tally on the poll.fm ballot.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for the Courier & Press award

Three editions of the online ballot are confirmed: 2019, 2022 and 2025. The program is annual, and the publisher's own historical coverage stretches the award's lineage much further back, naming a Courier-Press Male Athlete of the Year winner in 2002. That makes this one of the longer-running high school athlete awards in Indiana, even though the poll.fm ballot is a newer layer on top of it.

The voting cycle runs from December into June across the confirmed editions, and the current ballot closes at 12 p.m. CT on Friday, July 3. The publisher's post promoting the poll permits unlimited repeat voting until that moment, and that single sentence is the entire published rulebook for the window.

Neither the day voting opens nor any nomination round date is printed alongside the ballot, and the publisher publishes no eligibility text for nominees; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The ballot's own shape is equally spare: the poll.fm page carries a single question with a nominee list, and no category breakdown beyond it. A supporter who needs the opening date or the nomination process should read the high school sports stories the Courier & Press publishes each edition, since the newspaper announces the poll there before the ballot fills in its final details.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

Voting here takes no more than a minute. The supporter loads the poll.fm page numbered 15655700 that Crowdsignal serves for the Courier & Press award, reads the question asking who has your vote for the Male High School Athlete of the Year, and picks from the list of nominated Indiana high school athletes. Each nominee appears with his school beside the radio button, so the choice is unambiguous even for voters who follow only their own school's sports.

After selecting a nominee, the supporter presses the vote button; Crowdsignal logs the pick at once and updates the visible tally. The publisher's post invites repeat participation outright, permitting votes without limit until 12 p.m. CT on Friday, July 3. That makes the return visit the core skill of this ballot, since a supporter who votes once in December and disappears has wasted most of the window the publisher allows.

Anything the ballot adds on top of that, such as a login prompt or a verification step, appears on the poll.fm page itself at voting time, and the publisher has printed nothing about it in advance. Supporters who want the nominee list explained in context can find it in the Courier & Press high school sports stories, which introduce the Male Athlete of the Year field each cycle alongside the newspaper's other fan votes.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana fan votes

Several Indiana programs on this site sit beside this award, and comparing them shows what sets it apart. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year comes from the same publisher but narrows to a single sport, while this award spans every male high school sport the paper covers. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week runs on a weekly rhythm in a different market, and the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week takes a statewide, sport-specific shape.

Two further siblings round out the set: the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 3A Player of the Year, the latter joined by a 4A counterpart. Those programs classify nominees by class, whereas the Courier & Press award throws every nominated male athlete into a single field.

What separates this ballot is its publisher's stature in southwestern Indiana and the length of the award's history, which the paper's own coverage traces to 2002. A win here carries the weight of an Evansville newspaper honor behind it, not just an online tally, and the Orthopaedic Associates presentation ties the award to the local sports medicine community.

Pushing support inside the publisher's printed rule

Because the publisher explicitly allows voting as often as you'd like until the July 3 close, the honest playbook for this ballot is repetition and reach, not timing tricks. Ask every willing supporter to vote on the day they are asked and to set a reminder to return weekly, since the December-to-June window rewards supporters who pace themselves. Teammates, school booster groups and family group chats are the channels that actually move a poll like this, and each person votes from their own device under the rule as printed.

The ballot page prints no rule addressing paid or organized voting help, so the position on outside services is simply unstated by the publisher. Our award votes overview describes the general landscape for ballots of this kind without promising any result, and the organizer's own post remains the only authority on what this specific poll permits.