Who is the Courier & Press spring sports Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Courier & Press spring sports Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

The Evansville Courier & Press, a daily newspaper in Indiana, runs the spring sports Athlete of the Week as a reader vote during the high school spring season. Each week the publisher opens a fresh poll on Crowdsignal, the balloting service reached through poll.fm, and asks readers to choose a single athlete whose performance stood out that week. The poll sitting at the voting URL, poll.fm/15594129, carries the headline question "Who is the Courier & Press spring sports Athlete of the Week?" and is marked closed.

Sponsorship is stated in the publisher's own announcement: the series is "sponsored by Orthopaedic Associates." The nominees on a weekly ballot are high school athletes from Indiana schools, and the publisher pairs each name with a summary of that week's performance so readers can judge the case for every candidate. Because the series rotates its nominee slate weekly, the athletes you see depend entirely on which week's ballot you open, and the school names beside them anchor the program firmly in Indiana.

The table collects the program's standing details in one place. Everything else, from the nominee slate to the deadline, resets with each weekly ballot.

Confirmed editions and the spring voting window

Edition years standing behind this program are 2022 and 2025. Both are anchored to the spring sports season, which the program's timing places between March and May. Within that window the series runs as a sequence of weekly ballots rather than a single season-long vote, so a supporter who follows the series sees fresh candidates, a fresh question and a fresh deadline every week.

The ballot reachable at the voting URL today covers the week of March 30 to April 4 and is labeled closed, which is the normal state of any weekly poll once its Friday deadline passes. That closed ballot also shows how heavily readers can lean on the vote: the leading nominee on it finished with 38,203 votes, a 44 percent share of the total cast that week.

Not everything a reader might want is printed. The publisher has not posted precise opening and closing dates for individual weekly ballots; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for a nomination round, if a single exists before voting: no entry or nomination schedule appears with the poll. What is fixed is the season frame, March through May, and the weekly rhythm inside it; what shifts from week to week is everything else, including the athletes, the schools represented and the size of the final tally.

How a supporter votes in the weekly poll

Voting is a single-step public action on the Crowdsignal ballot. A reader opens the week's ballot on poll.fm, reviews the nominee slate with each athlete's performance summary, selects a single name and submits the vote. The publisher's printed rule on frequency is unusually generous: repeat voting is allowed without limit until 10 a.m. CT on Friday. That means a single person can return to the same ballot repeatedly through the week, and every return counts until the Friday morning cutoff ends the poll.

The ballot page shows no login requirement and no fee, and any reader who reaches the URL may take part. Once the deadline passes the ballot flips to closed, exactly as the current one displays, and the publisher's next weekly article carries the following week's poll. Because the nominee slate changes weekly, someone backing a particular athlete must act inside that athlete's own voting week; a vote placed after the poll closes has no effect.

The practical rhythm is therefore simple: find the week's article on the publisher's site or open the poll URL directly, vote early in the week, and plan returns across the days that remain before Friday morning. Supporters who follow that rhythm are working with the organizer's own rules rather than around them.

Where this poll sits among Indiana's athlete and player votes

Indiana readers have several similar public votes to follow, and this single is distinguishable by publisher, season and format. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week belongs to a different newspaper with a different candidate slate and a different schedule, so support in a single does not carry into the other. The Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year comes from the same publisher but covers the fall sport and a season-ending award rather than a weekly spring honor.

Statewide options sit further out. The Indiana High School Football Player of the Week follows a single sport across the whole state, while the Indiana SI awards split by class and season: the Boys Basketball Player of the Year, the Football 3A Player of the Year and the Football 4A Player of the Year.

What makes the Courier & Press spring poll distinct is the combination it alone carries: a weekly rhythm inside a March through May window, a spring sports nominee field, a Crowdsignal ballot at poll.fm, and sponsorship from Orthopaedic Associates. A supporter deciding where to spend attention should match the program to the athlete's sport and season before rallying votes.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this weekly poll

The mechanic rewards repetition. Since the publisher allows unlimited repeat voting until the Friday morning cutoff, a supporter's most effective legitimate tool is returning often and asking others to do the same: share the poll link with teammates, families and the broader school community early in the week rather than in the final hours, when a late push has little room to recover ground against a 38,203-vote lead of the kind the closed ballot shows.

The organizer's rules as printed do not restrict how a supporter spreads the word, only how often the vote itself may be cast, so classroom groups, booster posts and team chats all work inside the rules. For a broader look at tactics that fit public polls like this single, see our votes guide at get more votes online, and for award-style ballots generally see award vote guidance.