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

What the Courier & Press winter sports Athlete of the Week is

The Evansville Courier & Press runs a recurring Athlete of the Week programme built on reader voting, and the winter sports edition is its ballot for the high school winter season. The programme takes its name from the plain question the newspaper puts to readers: who is the Courier & Press winter sports Athlete of the Week. It sits in the sport vertical and uses a public-vote mechanic, meaning any visitor to the ballot page can take part without a nomination step of their own.

Voting runs on Crowdsignal, the poll.fm service behind the ballot address listed in the facts table below. The newspaper's own sports coverage promotes each round, and the publisher's full printed name, Evansville Courier & Press, appears on its Athlete of the Week pages alongside the poll embed.

The market is Indiana high school winter sport. Nominees appear on the ballot as athlete names paired with their schools, and the schools on the most recent closed winter edition included Harrison, Forest Park, Memorial, Princeton, Reitz, Northeast Dubois, South Knox and Mount Vernon, all Indiana high schools. That school list is the clearest signal of the ballot's catchment: it reaches across the state's high school winter programmes rather than a single conference.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for the winter sports ballot

Editions of the winter sports Athlete of the Week ran in 2022 and 2024, and that pair of years is what marks the programme as annual in this reference. The voting window falls between December and February, so each winter edition opens during the high school season and closes before spring. The most recent winter ballot is marked closed on poll.fm, and its final standings are published on the ballot page itself.

Those closed results are the only dated figures attached to the programme: the leading nominee, from Harrison, took 43 percent of the vote on 17,104 votes, and the Forest Park nominee followed at 32 percent on 12,601 votes. No other round dates, nomination deadlines or platform round schedules have been printed for the winter edition.

The winter ballot carries no printed category roster, no stated per-supporter limit, and no precise open and close dates; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The year the next winter edition opens is likewise unpublished, since no forward date exists for this programme. What is fixed is the shape: an annual December to February window, a poll.fm ballot, and a nominee roster the newspaper refreshes each cycle from its winter sports coverage.

How a supporter votes in the winter sports poll today

Voting on the Courier & Press winter ballot takes three short actions. A supporter opens the current poll.fm page for the winter sports Athlete of the Week, reads through the nominee list, clicks the radio button next to the athlete whose name they want to back, and presses the vote button to register the choice. The ballot prints each nominee's name beside their Indiana high school, so a supporter can find their school's athlete without hunting through a category menu.

Since Crowdsignal hosts it as an open public vote, the page prints no login requirement and no nomination form for readers. The newspaper handles nominations through its own sports desk, and the reader's job begins and ends at the poll.fm ballot. Once a poll closes, the same page converts into a results view, showing each nominee's percentage and raw total, as it now does for the latest closed winter edition with its 17,104-vote leading line.

One thing absent from the ballot is any rule about returning supporters. The Evansville Courier & Press publishes no per-supporter limit, no daily-vote rule, and no eligibility statement for the winter poll, and no account wall stands between a visitor and the vote button. Anyone wishing to vote again on a later day simply finds the ballot still open during the December to February window and repeats the same three actions: open, select, cast.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Among the Indiana reader-vote programmes in this reference, the Courier & Press winter sports Athlete of the Week has nearest neighbours in two groups. The first group shares its publisher: the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year comes from the same newspaper but covers the fall season and a year-end award rather than a mid-season winter honour. The second group shares the state but not the publisher: the Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week is a different newspaper's reader poll, and the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week runs at statewide scale for a single sport.

A third group covers post-season player of the year voting: 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. Those ballots are class-based awards, while the Courier & Press winter poll is a seasonal athlete-of-the-week format spanning the whole winter programme.

What makes the winter ballot distinct is its breadth of schools. Harrison, Forest Park, Memorial, Princeton, Reitz, Northeast Dubois, South Knox and Mount Vernon all appeared on the most recent closed edition, a wider geographic spread than a single-city ballot would carry, and its December to February window fills the part of the calendar the football programmes leave open.

Rallying support for a Courier & Press winter nominee

Since the winter ballot is an open public vote on poll.fm, support for a Courier & Press nominee comes down to moving people to the live link while the December to February window is open. The ballot asks nothing of a supporter beyond selecting a name and casting the vote, so a school community that shares the exact poll.fm address, rather than a homepage, removes every step between a fan and a counted vote. On the subject of outside help, the Evansville Courier & Press has printed nothing for the winter poll, so the organizer's own ballot page is the only authority on what is permitted. For the general tactics that work on newspaper reader polls of this shape, see our votes guide, and on the question of paid support for reader ballots, the legality page sets out the position without promising any outcome.