IndyStar Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the IndyStar Athlete of the Week?

The IndyStar Athlete of the Week is a free, recurring fan-vote recognition programme published at indystar.com by The Indianapolis Star, the Gannett-owned regional daily that anchors the USA TODAY Network's Indiana coverage. Each week during the IHSAA prep sports calendar, IndyStar sports reporters select a slate of nominees from Indianapolis-metro high schools — students who have posted standout performances across football, basketball, track, soccer, swimming, or any other IHSAA-sanctioned sport — and open the ballot to public fan voting.

• Powered by SecondStreet, the contest-platform provider that hosts the majority of Gannett's newspaper athlete polls across the USA TODAY Network.
• Hosted at indystar.com, which draws more than one million monthly digital readers from Hamilton, Marion, Hendricks, Johnson, and Boone counties combined.
• Covers all three IHSAA sports seasons — fall, winter, and spring — plus any special recognition weeks the sports desk runs around tournaments or postseason play.
• The vote cap is one vote per hour per device; no email address, account, or subscription is required to vote.
• Winners are announced on indystar.com, featured in the paper's social media channels and sports newsletters, and in many cases highlighted in the print edition — a Gannett byline that appears permanently in web searches of the athlete's name.
• The IndyStar also operates the Indiana Sports Awards, a separate year-end Gannett programme selecting state-level finalists from a pool that frequently includes prior Athlete of the Week honourees.

A win produces a permanent, searchable Gannett byline — the IndyStar's digital articles rank consistently for athlete-name searches, making this recognition visible to college coaches and recruiting services.

Which Indianapolis-metro schools and conferences compete in this poll?

IndyStar nominates athletes from high schools across its primary coverage footprint: Marion County and the immediately surrounding counties — Hamilton to the north, Hendricks to the west, Johnson to the south, and Boone to the northwest. The schools below represent the programmes most frequently generating nominees, sorted by conference and area. The IHSAA Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference (MIC) and the Hoosier Crossroads Conference (HCC) anchor the field.

The MIC — Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference — is a Marion County–centred league that includes the largest public high schools on Indianapolis' north, south, east, and west sides. Enrolments at Ben Davis, Warren Central, and Pike routinely exceed 3,000 students, producing deep alumni bases and highly organised booster clubs that mobilise efficiently for online polls. Ben Davis has claimed more Indiana football state championships than any other school in the state, making the programme's fans among the most organised and vocal in any IndyStar poll during football season.

The Hoosier Crossroads Conference (HCC) spans the fast-growing northern and western suburbs — Carmel, Westfield, Brownsburg, Avon, Hamilton Southeastern, and Zionsville. Carmel in particular is one of the most data-rich prep programmes in Indiana: the Greyhounds' swim team has won more consecutive IHSAA state swimming championships than any public school programme in the country, and Carmel's alumni network extends nationally through competitive-swimming pipelines to NCAA programmes at Indiana, Notre Dame, and beyond.

How does voting for the IndyStar Athlete of the Week work?

The ballot appears inside the High School Sports section at indystar.com and requires nothing from the voter — no Gannett subscription, no USA TODAY account, and no email address. The SecondStreet widget loads with each nominee's name, school, sport, and a brief performance note beside a running vote count visible to all visitors. For a plain-language overview of how SecondStreet and similar newspaper poll platforms handle online voting mechanics, see our contest-voting guide.

SecondStreet enforces one vote per device per hour — the same cap structure used across the Gannett/USA TODAY Network's athlete polls nationwide. Each device (phone, tablet, desktop, laptop) operates as an independent voting surface and resets its own cooldown timer each hour. A family with two smartphones, a tablet, and a laptop can cast four votes in the first hour of the poll — and four more in each subsequent hour until the poll closes.

The poll window typically spans two to three days, opening on Monday or Tuesday after the IndyStar sports desk reviews weekend results and closes on Thursday or Friday afternoon. The live widget displays the remaining time alongside running totals. Voting is accessible from any location — family members outside Indiana and supporters in other states can vote exactly as local readers can.

IndyStar also runs the SecondStreet-hosted Indiana Sports Awards programme alongside the weekly poll, where accumulated Athlete of the Week honourees are considered in category voting for end-of-year recognition. Winning the weekly poll can therefore serve as a stepping stone to the larger annual awards cycle, which the IndyStar co-presents with the USA TODAY Network's Indiana properties.

How is the IndyStar Athlete of the Week winner decided?

The winning athlete is whichever nominee holds the highest vote count at the moment the poll closes — a pure fan-vote outcome with no editorial weighting applied after the ballot is set. The IndyStar sports desk shapes the field by selecting nominees; once the poll opens, vote count alone determines the result.

1. Performance submission: coaches, parents, school athletic contacts, and readers submit outstanding game or meet performances to the IndyStar sports desk — typically via email — covering results from the prior weekend and early week.
2. Nominee selection: IndyStar reporters and editors curate the weekly ballot by editorial judgement. Not every submitted performance earns a nomination; the desk aims to represent multiple sports, both genders, and different parts of the coverage area where possible.
3. Poll opens at indystar.com: the SecondStreet ballot goes live, usually Monday or Tuesday morning, alongside a brief article describing each nominee's performance. Live totals update continuously.
4. Winner announced: after close, IndyStar publishes the winner's name, school, and performance on indystar.com, in social posts, and typically in its email sports briefings. The recognition stands as a permanent article in the IndyStar archive.

There is no cash or physical prize. The value is reputational and archival — a published Gannett article that surfaces in any web search of the athlete's name and is frequently cited in recruiting profiles submitted to college coaches.

Getting more votes for an IndyStar Athlete of the Week nominee

Every vote campaign for this SecondStreet poll reduces to the same arithmetic: total votes = (devices voting) × (hours remaining ÷ 1) × (share rate). Distributing the direct poll link — not just a general appeal — as early and as widely as possible, and reminding networks to return hourly, is the consistent difference between a comfortable win and a narrow loss. For a full breakdown of how the hourly-cap math applies to online newspaper polls, visit our buy-votes-online guide. The notes below focus on what actually moves the needle in the Indianapolis metro specifically.

Indianapolis-specific mobilisation patterns

Two network types in the Indianapolis metro consistently outperform their size. First, the Hamilton County suburban network — Carmel, Westfield, Fishers, Zionsville — reaches families who are highly active on neighbourhood apps (Nextdoor, the Fishers/Carmel Facebook groups) and respond quickly to appeals framed around community pride. Second, the Marion County west-side and east-side MIC communities — Ben Davis, Warren Central, Pike — have deep intergenerational alumni ties and strong connections to Indianapolis Black community networks on Facebook that spread quickly when a local athlete is in contention.

Posts that name the athlete, school, sport, and specific contest title — "Vote for [Name] from [School] for the IndyStar Athlete of the Week — you can vote once per hour at indystar.com until Friday" — perform substantially better than generic "go vote" shares. Include the direct URL on every post, not just the homepage; searches consistently show that most voters drop off if they have to navigate manually to find the ballot.

When organic networks have been fully deployed and the nominee is still trailing, some booster clubs and families turn to a paid real-voter promotion service. If you take that route, our sports fan poll service is built around paced, hourly-cap-matched vote delivery — a different model from bot scripts that violate the one-hour cooldown. See our how-to guides for timing and sequencing advice.

What are the rules — and can you buy votes for the IndyStar poll?

The IndyStar Athlete of the Week is a reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize and no Indiana prize-promotion statute framework. The operative restrictions are SecondStreet's platform terms, which primarily prohibit automated scripts, macros, and bots that circumvent the hourly cap. For a broader discussion of legality and platform terms across newspaper athlete polls generally, see our full guide.

Two categories of activity are treated very differently by SecondStreet's platform:

• Automated scripts and bots — software that submits rapid-fire votes from the same device fingerprint or cycles through IP addresses to bypass the hourly cooldown. This violates SecondStreet's stated terms, produces traffic patterns that are detectable by the platform, and results in vote removal.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people voting from their own devices within the hourly cap, reached through a commercial promotion service rather than a booster club email. In mechanical terms this is identical to a school administrator sending a voting link to 500 families — it is fans voting, accessed through a different channel.

Whether that distinction satisfies the spirit of the specific poll terms is a judgement each entrant must make by reading the current official page. For a newspaper fan poll with no prize and no formal contest-law structure, the risk is reputational rather than legal. Families and boosters should weigh that honestly against the recognition value this IndyStar credit provides.

IndyStar Athlete of the Week voting timeline — when does it open and close?

Voting follows the IHSAA three-season school-year calendar. The table below maps the programme to the Indiana prep sports schedule; exact dates shift each year based on the IHSAA calendar and IndyStar editorial scheduling.

Within each week, the typical pattern is: poll opens Monday or Tuesday morning after the IndyStar sports desk processes weekend game results, and closes Thursday or Friday afternoon. The exact close time is displayed on the SecondStreet widget at indystar.com — always verify it there rather than assuming a fixed close hour, as the IndyStar adjusts for IHSAA tournament scheduling and holiday weeks.

Fall football weeks at the MIC level — particularly any week involving Ben Davis, Warren Central, or Cathedral in a rivalry matchup — consistently produce the highest vote totals of the school year. Spring track weeks, by contrast, can be decided with a few hundred votes when school is nearly out and network mobilisation is lower. Knowing which type of week you're in is essential for calibrating how much effort to put in before the close.

For all Indiana prep sports context and related voting contests, visit our Indiana contest guide. For the full US contest directory, see our USA hub.