The South Bend Tribune Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who controls the South Bend Tribune Athlete of the Week ballot

A nominee's supporters usually arrive at this poll with one urgent question: who actually runs it, and can anything be done about the count? The answer sits with the South Bend Tribune, the daily newspaper serving South Bend, Indiana, whose sports desk packages The South Bend Tribune Athlete of the Week as a recurring reader feature on its high school sports coverage. The paper publishes at southbendtribune.com and ties the program to its own coverage area, not to a statewide athletic body.

The voting itself is hosted away from the newspaper's site, on Crowdsignal at poll.fm, the survey platform many publishers use for reader polls. The live ballot for the confirmed round sits at https://poll.fm/17074158, and the page title carries the poll number 17074158 next to the round's date range. The vertical is sport, the mechanic is a public vote open to any reader, and the audience is general: any reader who opens the page can take part, which is exactly why a surge of support from one school community moves the tally so quickly.

Because the ballot lives on a third-party host, supporters should reach it through the link the Tribune prints in its own story rather than by searching for the poll. The table underneath collects the program's fixed details.

The dated record behind the Tribune's athlete of the week poll

The confirmed round covers May 25 to June 2. The Tribune's own story opens with the line "Voting is now open for the May 25-June 2 South Bend Tribune Athlete of the Week poll", and the same story fixes the deadline: "the poll closes Saturday, June 6 at 11:59 p.m. ET." The ballot page now carries a poll closed notice, so that window has finished and the tally beside it is final for this cycle.

The program's confirmed editions span 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The gap between 2022 and 2024 is part of the printed history, not something to smooth over, and the repeated years are what mark the program as annual. A 2027 round is the next cycle the pattern points toward, though the Tribune has not yet printed an announcement for it.

One figure from the round is worth quoting exactly: the story describes "this poll's 33 nominees from 19 different South Bend Tribune coverage area schools." That makes the ballot a broad picture of the paper's coverage area rather than a single-school or single-sport showdown.

Two things the Tribune has not published matter just as much. Whether a separate nomination round precedes the voting window is not stated anywhere in its coverage. And the paper has printed no schedule of future rounds, so the opening date of the next Athlete of the Week ballot is something to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter actually votes in the Tribune's poll

Nothing about this ballot is complicated. A supporter reaches the poll at poll.fm/17074158, either by typing the address or by following the link in the Tribune's story. The page lists the nominees, each line pairing an athlete with a sport and a coverage-area school, so a reader can find their player by scanning for the school name rather than the athlete's name alone.

Choosing a nominee is done on the page itself, and submitting the choice registers it on the poll. There is no panel, no jury and no entry form between the reader and the count, which is what the public-vote mechanic means in practice for this program.

The Tribune's printed rule for this round is unusually open: the story states the poll runs "with no voting restrictions until the poll closes Saturday, June 6 at 11:59 p.m." That is the paper's own wording, and it means a supporter's repeat visits during the window fall inside the rules as printed. It also means the deadline carries real weight, because a push that lands after the Saturday-night close registers nowhere.

One caution belongs here. The ballot page for this round now shows a poll closed notice, so votes submitted today would land on whatever ballot is currently live rather than on the May 25-June 2 tally. Checking the date range in the poll title before voting is the one habit that keeps a supporter's effort pointed at the right round.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana's publisher-run polls

Indiana readers have several publisher-run public votes to choose from, and they are easy to confuse because the formats rhyme. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week is the closest cousin: another Indiana newspaper running a weekly reader poll on its high school sports coverage, in a different city under a different masthead.

The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year sits at the other end of the scale, a season-ending honor rather than a weekly round. The Indiana High School Football Player of the Week covers the whole state under its own program, and the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Indiana SI Football 3A and 4A Player of the Year ballots are classification-specific honors under the SI banner.

What separates the Tribune's program from all of them is its shape: a newspaper-branded, coverage-area athlete of the week series hosted on poll.fm, with a spring window in the confirmed round rather than a fall football schedule. A supporter looking for a South Bend area nominee should therefore start from the Tribune's own story link, because none of the sibling programs answers for this ballot's count.

Strengthening support for a nominee in the Tribune's poll

Because the Tribune's own wording allows unrestricted voting until the Saturday-night close, the practical levers in this program are repetition and reach: supporters who return to the ballot through the window, and communities that circulate the poll.fm link the paper prints in its story. The deadline is fixed, so effort spent before June 6 counts and effort spent after it does not.

The paper's coverage prints no rule addressing outside help for nominees, so the reference point for any support campaign is the ballot's printed restriction line, which for this round is the no-restrictions wording quoted above. Readers weighing paid support alongside organic pushes can compare options in our award votes page, keeping in mind that no outside push can lock in a win in a public poll.