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

What the Journal & Courier Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

Each week, the Journal & Courier Athlete of the Week hands one high school sports honor to the nominee who collects the most reader clicks. The organizer is the Journal & Courier, the daily newspaper based in Lafayette, Indiana, whose sports desk has run the series across confirmed seasons in 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Each week the paper shortlists a slate of high school athletes from its coverage area, publishes a short profile of every nominee, and hands the decision to readers.

Crowdsignal at poll.fm carries the balloting itself, the polling platform behind a large share of newspaper reader polls. The current ballot in the series sits at poll.fm/16668813, and the publisher's weekly story links straight to it. Recent editions carry an Ivy Tech sponsorship, named in the voting story itself.

Classified in the sport vertical, the award works as a best-of honor: whoever leads when the ballot closes at 5 p.m. ET Friday takes the weekly title. Because it is a reader poll rather than a judges' award, the size of a nominee's community directly shapes the outcome, which is why the poll draws intense local engagement every week of the August to May calendar.

The dated record: confirmed seasons and the weekly voting window

Five seasons of this poll are confirmed: 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. That is a five-year run with a gap in 2023, and it establishes the ballot as an annual fixture of the Indiana high school sports calendar, not a one-off promotion. The next expected season is 2027, following the August to May rhythm the series has kept.

Within each season the program is weekly. The publisher's own voting story fixes the deadline precisely: voting is open until 5 p.m. ET Friday. That single dated fact is the most useful thing a supporter can know, because it defines the window in which every click matters. A ballot opened for one week's nominees is closed for good once that Friday deadline passes, and the next week brings a fresh poll with a new slate.

One visible result from the series shows the scale the poll reaches: one closed ballot recorded a nominee at 53 percent on 11,139 total votes. That figure comes from the ballot page itself and gives a sense of how many clicks a competitive weekly race in this program can attract.

What the organizer has not published on the ballot page is the standing list of award categories or nominee classes that the series rotates through; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The weekly structure is clear, but the exact shape of each week's ballot is something the paper sets fresh with every edition.

How a supporter votes in the Journal & Courier Athlete of the Week today

Voting here takes a click and nothing more. A supporter opens the current Crowdsignal ballot, sees the weekly slate of nominated high school athletes listed with their schools, selects one, and submits. The Journal & Courier's published instruction is explicit and unusually generous: \"You may vote in this poll as much as you would like; just please refresh the page to ensure it counts.\"

That instruction does two things. First, it removes any per-person limit for this poll, so a supporter can return again and again until the Friday 5 p.m. ET close. Second, it tells voters exactly why the refresh matters: on this platform a repeat vote needs the page reloaded so the click registers. A supporter working the ballot properly therefore follows a click, refresh, click rhythm across the week.

No login is mentioned on the ballot, and no eligibility rule for voters is stated anywhere in the publisher's instructions. Nomination works differently from voting: the paper asks readers to email nominee names, with notable statistics or accomplishments, to its sports desk address, and the desk builds each weekly slate from what arrives. So the path onto the ballot runs through the newsroom, while the path to winning runs through whoever can turn out the most clicks before Friday afternoon.

How this poll sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Indiana has a dense field of publisher-run high school sports polls, and the Journal & Courier Athlete of the Week is the Lafayette area's entry in that crowd. Its closest structural sibling is the Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week, a same-format weekly reader poll run by a different Indiana newspaper for a different market. The two never share a ballot, and a vote in one carries no weight toward the other.

The state's other programs answer to their own publishers too. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year is a season-ending award rather than a weekly honor, while the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week runs at statewide scale. 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 round out the set, each tied to a specific classification or sport.

What distinguishes the Journal & Courier version is its breadth: it is not confined to one sport or one class, so any high school athlete in the paper's coverage area can land on a weekly ballot. Combined with the unlimited-vote rule and the Friday 5 p.m. ET close, that makes it the most open-ended of the Indiana polls on this site.

Strengthening support in this weekly poll

Because the Journal & Courier allows unlimited voting with a refresh, the honest way to build support here is volume plus persistence: rally teammates, classmates and local fans, and have each of them vote daily until the Friday 5 p.m. ET close. A nominee whose community treats the ballot as a week-long habit beats one whose supporters vote once and forget. The publisher's own refresh instruction means no supporter is ever locked out after a first click.

On outside help, the source material carries no statement from the Journal & Courier about purchased votes either way, so nothing is promised in either direction. What is certain is the ballot's structure: a plain Crowdsignal poll with a public running total, where the 53 percent and 11,139-vote result from one closed edition shows how wide the margins can get. Anyone weighing purchased support should start with how to get more votes online and the award-specific notes at buying votes for award contests, and should read the publisher's current voting story before acting, since the paper sets its own terms each week.