The Ivy Tech Journal & Courier Female Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Journal & Courier runs this poll

The Ivy Tech Journal & Courier Female Athlete of the Week gives Indiana high school sports readers a weekly say over which female athlete earns the honor. The Journal & Courier publishes the ballot and Ivy Tech sponsors it. The organizer is a daily newspaper whose sports desk covers high school athletics across its Indiana coverage area, and the award exists to give that coverage a weekly reader hook: the paper profiles the nominees, and the community decides who wins.

The audience is deliberately broad. Because the publisher encourages fans to vote as many times as they wish, the ballot is shaped by whoever cares enough to show up repeatedly: classmates, family members, teammates from other sports, and general readers of the newspaper's high school sports pages. That is why the result is best read as a measure of community mobilization rather than a strict sporting judgment.

The ballot itself lives on poll.fm, the Crowdsignal polling service, with the current week's page at poll.fm/17105098. The poll page is minimal: a question, a list of nominees with their schools, and a vote button. The surrounding article on the newspaper's site carries the context, the sponsor branding and the voting instructions.

Which editions are confirmed and when the ballots run

Editions of the series are confirmed for 2022, 2025 and 2026, which qualifies the Journal & Courier program as an annual fixture on the Indiana high school sports calendar. Within the recent seasons, ballots have appeared between January and September, matching the rhythm of the school sports year: winter and spring seasons feed the early-month polls, and fall sports carry the late-summer ballots.

The most recent ballot closed with a clear result: the leading nominee finished with 87 percent of 2,218 votes, far ahead of the runner-up at 7 percent with 187 votes, and a third nominee at 4 percent. That spread is typical of a poll where organized supporter bases turn out and the rest of the field splits the remainder.

The weekly cycle is short. The publisher's stated pattern is that voting is open without limits until the poll closes at noon on Thursday, and a fresh nominee list follows. What the organizer has not published anywhere is a category list for the ballot, so the exact structure of each week's nominees should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle.

Exact open dates for each weekly ballot are also not printed in advance on the poll page itself; the accompanying article in the newspaper's sports section is where each week's window is announced.

How a supporter votes in the current poll

Nothing about this ballot takes more than a minute. A supporter opens the live poll.fm page, reads the question asking who is the Ivy Tech Journal & Courier Female Athlete of the Week, and sees the nominee list with each athlete's school beside her name. Selecting a nominee and submitting the vote takes seconds, and no payment or entry of any kind is involved.

The decisive rule is the publisher's own instruction: fans are encouraged to cast their votes as many times as they wish. There is no stated per-person limit, no daily cap printed on the ballot, and no eligibility requirement for who may vote beyond having access to the page. The only hard boundary is time, because the poll closes at noon on Thursday.

Two practical points follow. First, since repeat voting is allowed, a nominee's total reflects persistence as much as popularity, and a supporter base that returns daily will outpace one that votes once. Second, the ballot page does not state whether an account or email verification is required to submit a vote, so a supporter should simply attempt the vote and follow whatever the page asks.

Because each week's poll is a fresh page with a fresh nominee list, a vote cast on last week's ballot after it closed has no effect. The live link is the only one that matters.

How this poll sits beside other Indiana athlete votes

Indiana has a crowded field of reader-voted high school sports honors, and this program occupies a specific niche within it: a newspaper-sponsored, weekly, female-athlete ballot with unlimited voting. Neighbouring programs on this site cover the same general audience from different publishers and angles.

The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week is the closest structural cousin, another daily-paper weekly vote, while the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week narrows to a single sport. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year runs on a season-end scale rather than weekly.

A separate family of ballots carries the Sports Illustrated brand in this state: the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year, the Indiana SI Football 3A Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 4A Player of the Year, which split by classification.

What distinguishes the Journal & Courier series within this set is the combination of its unlimited-vote rule and its Thursday noon close, which rewards sustained supporter effort inside a short weekly window, and its focus on female athletes, which none of the sibling ballots above shares.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this weekly poll

This poll's rules make mobilization unusually powerful. Because the Journal & Courier invites fans to vote as many times as they wish before the Thursday noon close, a nominee's supporters are not rationed to a single vote each; the winning margin in the latest ballot, 87 percent of 2,218 votes, came from a base that clearly returned repeatedly. The practical playbook is therefore about reach and rhythm: share the poll link where the nominee's community already gathers, ask for votes early in the week rather than in the final hours, and remind people that the deadline is Thursday at noon, not the weekend.

The organizer has printed no rule restricting how supporters promote their nominee, and the unlimited-vote instruction is the operative guidance. What matters for standing is simply the count at close. For tactics suited to an open poll like this one, see how to get more votes online, and for the wider question of outside help, the award votes overview sets out the general landscape without promising any particular outcome.