Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot, six classifications, no separate bracket

Kansas runs six KSHSAA classifications, from Class 6A city and suburban powerhouses down to Class 1A programs that field entire football rosters out of a few dozen boys. The Catchy Awards doesn't split the ballot by class. A nominee from the smallest school in the state sits in the exact same category as a nominee from the largest, judged on the same vote count. That's unusual, and it's the thing that makes the program worth understanding before you assume your school's odds.

KWCH 12, the Scripps-owned station out of Wichita, built the Catchy Awards under its Catch It Kansas prep-sports brand. It isn't a KSHSAA program. It isn't even Wichita-only, despite the station's home base: nominees come from classifications and conferences statewide, county leagues and city districts alike, all funneled onto one page at catchitkansas.com. More Kansas prep-sports coverage runs on the Kansas contests hub, alongside the full USA fan-vote directory.

Thirteen years, ~30 categories, one ceremony

2025 was year 13. Trace that back and the program launched in 2013, which puts real longevity behind what could easily have been a one-off station promotion. Roughly 3,000 fans cast ballots per edition, a confirmed number, not a rounded guess, and a meaningful turnout for a single-state prep-sports vote with no recurring weekly cycle to build habit around.

The categories themselves run wide: Best Player, Best Team, Best Moment, and Best Coach, each split out by sport and by class. So a school with a big year in football, basketball, and track isn't limited to one shot at recognition. It can turn up under four separate headings in the same edition. That's a structural fact worth knowing if you're trying to figure out why a rival program seems to be "everywhere" on the ballot.

Why there's no leaderboard to check mid-vote

Ballot opens in spring. Results surface once, at a June broadcast on KWCH. Nothing in between. That's a real difference from a rolling weekly poll where you can watch a count move and adjust your push accordingly; here, the spring window is the entire opportunity, and then the announcement is the announcement.

Confirm exact opening and closing dates on the live page at catchitkansas.com each year; KWCH sets them fresh, and old posts from prior editions stay indexed and can mislead a search. This is a different program entirely from KSHB 41's Hy-Vee Athlete of the Week out of Kansas City, which runs on a short recurring cycle rather than one annual reveal (see the Athlete of the Week guide if that's the one you're actually looking for). General mechanics that apply to any single-window fan vote, Kansas or otherwise, are covered in how to win an online voting contest.

What a smaller-school community can realistically do with one shot a year

Because a Class 1A nominee competes head-to-head against Class 6A nominees with no separate bracket, the enrollment gap that decides playoff seeding doesn't decide this vote. A booster club at a 200-student school and an alumni network at a 2,000-student school are working from the same category page. So the practical question for a small program isn't "can we compete," it's whether the community mobilizes as one push during the single spring window, since there's no following week to recover ground.

That means naming the exact category and nominee when asking people to vote, not just pointing at catchitkansas.com generally, since with ~30 categories live at once, a vague ask gets lost. Alumni chains, county-league rivalries, and small-town Facebook groups tend to move faster than a large suburban district's more diffuse fan base, even when the district has more total supporters on paper. For campaigns that want that organic push backed by fan-poll vote support, the honest caveat is the same one that applies to any spring-to-June program: there's no partial credit for a strong push that starts after the window closes. General guidance on running any online vote campaign covers mechanics that apply beyond Kansas, and whether buying votes is legal is worth reading before assuming what "legitimate support" means for a program like this one.