KWQC-TV6 Spotlight Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three winners, three counties, two states, one 2025 season

Davenport North took it in March. Maquoketa took it in April. By November, the winner was Annawan-Wethersfield, a consolidated school across the river in Henry County, Illinois. That spread, inside a single season, is the fact that separates this poll from a typical single-district athlete-of-the-week vote. KWQC-TV6 is the NBC affiliate for the Quad Cities, and its broadcast footprint straddles the Mississippi: Scott and Clinton counties on the Iowa side, Rock Island and Henry counties on the Illinois side. The Spotlight Athlete of the Week poll, published weekly on kwqc.com during the high school season, draws its nominee pool from that entire cross-river market rather than picking a lane. No account is required to vote, and the poll is free. It sits alongside other Iowa fan-vote programs tracked on this site, but the two-state reach is what makes it worth a separate look.

KWQC-TV6 Spotlight Athlete of the Week, confirmed facts

Item	Detail
Organiser	KWQC-TV6 (NBC affiliate)
Where to vote	kwqc.com, Sports section poll
Cost to vote	Free, no account, no registration
Poll cadence	Weekly during the high school sports season
Voting window closes	Wednesday at noon
Confirmed 2025 winners	Davenport North (March), Maquoketa (April), Annawan-Wethersfield (November)

A media market that splits a state line down the middle

Davenport alone runs three public high schools (North, Central, and West), each with its own attendance zone inside Davenport Community Schools. That's a genuinely different competitive shape than what a nominee from Bettendorf or Pleasant Valley faces just up the river in the same county. And it's a different shape again from Clinton, where one school anchors the whole county seat, or Maquoketa, sitting inland in Jackson County with a single program carrying the town's sports identity. Cross the river and the pattern repeats in miniature: Illinois-side communities like Annawan-Wethersfield, a consolidated Henry County district, compete for the same weekly nomination slot as Quad Cities schools many times their enrollment. Nobody adjusts the ballot for that. The Illinois nominee stands or falls on the same public vote as a Davenport one.

Confirmed 2025 results by community

Community	County / state	Confirmed result
Davenport North High School	Scott County, Iowa	Winning nominee, March 2025
Maquoketa High School	Jackson County, Iowa	Winning nominee, April 2025
Annawan-Wethersfield High School	Henry County, Illinois	Winning nominee, November 2025
Bettendorf High School	Scott County, Iowa	Regular nominee-pool entrant
Clinton High School	Clinton County, Iowa	Regular nominee-pool entrant

A Maquoketa or Annawan-Wethersfield nominee draws on a small, centralized network where the football or volleyball team is the town's shared Friday-night subject. A Davenport nominee is fighting for oxygen inside a three-high-school city system that's also splitting attention three ways internally. Same ballot, very different starting position. That's part of why the smaller towns keep winning. Readers comparing formats sometimes check the Iowa High School Athlete of the Week vote too, which runs statewide rather than tied to one broadcast market.

Why Wednesday noon, and how a nomination actually gets built

Most single-school polls close the same night or the following weekend. KWQC's Wednesday-noon window is later, deliberately. Games run through Friday and Saturday across the whole market, so the sports desk needs Monday and Tuesday to compile a fair pool before opening the vote. Closing Sunday would cut out half the weekend's performances. Nominations arrive from coaches, parents, and school contacts, plus from KWQC's own reporters covering games live. A useful tip names the athlete, school, sport, opponent, and the specific stat line. "23 kills against Bettendorf" beats "had a great game," and that's the difference between a tip that gets used and one that gets skipped in a busy week.

Running a campaign across a river, not just a street

The Monday-to-Wednesday window is longer than it looks, and that's the whole strategic opening. A single announcement the day the poll goes live gets buried by Wednesday. Two or three reminders (Monday night, Tuesday, Wednesday morning) consistently outperform one loud push, especially for a nominee from a smaller town where word travels through a handful of group chats rather than a citywide network. For a Davenport-area nominee, that means naming the specific school (North, Central, West, Bettendorf, or Pleasant Valley) every time. Generic "vote Quad Cities" messaging gets lost among three overlapping fan bases in one metro. For a Maquoketa, Clinton, or Annawan-Wethersfield nominee, the advantage runs the other way: fewer people to reach, but nearly all of them reachable in one or two messages. Real fan-vote campaigns generally work this way regardless of platform, drawing on the same core approach covered in our guide to buying votes online: clear ask, specific deadline, repeated at the right intervals. Anyone weighing whether outside help crosses a line should read how safe vote support actually works before joining a campaign. The same rhythm carries over to the Iowa High School Football Player of the Week and to any weekly fan poll with a public, no-account ballot. Our guide on getting people to vote for you covers the same reminder cadence in more depth.