Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why this Wichita award works differently than every other fan poll in Kansas

No public link. No vote button. Search for how to support a nominee at the Greater Wichita Sports Banquet and the standard fan-poll playbook (find a poll page, click, share, repeat) simply doesn't apply here. The Wichita Sports Commission runs this one differently: a media panel picks the winners, not a running tally on a webpage.

That distinction matters, because most people arriving at this page are looking for the wrong thing. They want a vote link. What actually exists is a nomination-and-selection process spanning high school, college, and professional levels in one ceremony, held every June in Wichita. Few Kansas sports honors reach across all three tiers at once. Statewide prep polls stop at the high school line. Even the Catchy Awards, KWCH 12's public fan-vote ballot, is prep-only. This banquet folds a high schooler, a college athlete, and a Wichita-area professional into the same evening.

The tradeoff is real. A media panel means editorial credibility instead of raw click counts. It also means the strategies that work for a genuine public ballot, like the DiRenna Awards in Kansas City, don't transfer here. Getting someone recognized at this banquet runs through a different channel entirely, and the rest of this page is about what that channel actually is.

The eight awards handed out at the Wichita Sports Commission banquet

Eight categories, not one blanket "Athlete of the Year" title. Two are reserved for high school athletes, split by gender. One award recognizes a high school male athlete of the year, named for a Wichita-born running back who reached the NFL Hall of Fame; a companion award honors the high school female athlete of the year, named for a Wichita-raised guard inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame. Both trace back to Wichita natives who once played on the same city's high school fields today's nominees do.

Beyond the two prep awards, the banquet names a College Male Athlete of the Year and a College Female Athlete of the Year, drawn from Wichita State and the smaller NAIA and NJCAA programs around the metro. A Professional Athlete of the Year rounds out the individual honors, open to athletes with a Wichita-area connection competing at the pro or high-minor level. Coaches get recognized too: separate High School Boys and High School Girls Coach of the Year awards, plus a broader Coach of the Year award named for a longtime Wichita State head coach whose program won multiple national titles.

Eight categories across three competitive tiers is a wide net for a single-city banquet. Compare that with Best of Johnson County, which runs 200-plus categories but stays entirely inside local business, not sports. This banquet trades category count for depth: fewer slots, each one covering a genuinely different level of competition.

How nominations turn into finalists, and why there's no vote page

Here's the mechanic, stated plainly: the Wichita Sports Commission's media panel, not the public, decides who wins. Nominations come in from coaches, athletic directors, and local media covering the Wichita-area sports scene throughout the school year. The panel reviews performance records and narrows the field to finalists ahead of the June ceremony.

Those finalists become public knowledge before the banquet happens. That's the part that actually matters for anyone trying to support a nominee. There's no ballot to click, but there is a window, once the finalist list goes public, where local coverage, school shout-outs, and community buzz can shape how a name is remembered even though it can't change a panel's decision.

No published cap, no six-hour reset, no device limit, because none of that applies when a panel makes the call instead of a crowd. That single structural fact, one panel decides instead of thousands of individual clicks, is the whole reason this page exists separately from every other Kansas sports poll in this guide.

The Wichita-area schools and colleges that feed this banquet

Sedgwick County's high school density does most of the heavy lifting here. Wichita East, Wichita Heights, Wichita Northwest, Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic, and Bishop Carroll Catholic all sit inside city limits; Andover, Derby, Maize, and Goddard ring the metro within a short drive. Any of them can produce a finalist in a given year, and the panel's judgment, rather than a fan base's turnout, is what decides between them.

On the college side, Wichita State University's NCAA Division I programs anchor the College categories, with Newman University and Friends University (both NAIA, both inside city limits) and Butler Community College in nearby El Dorado rounding out a genuinely regional pool. That mirrors the pattern seen at Best of Lawrence, where a university town's identity shapes an entire local awards program, except here it's one category among eight rather than the whole show.

The Professional category pulls from Wichita's pro and high-minor sports presence. The city fields an ECHL hockey club and an AA-level baseball club, among other outlets, giving the panel a real, if smaller, pool of pro-level candidates with a Wichita connection to weigh each June.

If you're trying to get someone recognized here, this is what actually moves the needle

Start with the nomination itself. A panel works from what's submitted: game logs, season stats, letters from coaches or athletic directors, and any regional or state-level recognition already earned. A thin submission competing against a fully documented one loses before the panel even convenes. That's the single biggest lever available, and it has nothing to do with clicks.

Once the finalist list is public, a second lever opens up: visibility. A school's booster network sharing the finalist announcement, a coach quoted in local coverage, a hometown paper picking up the story: none of that changes a vote count (there isn't one), but it does shape how a panel member remembers a name walking into the banquet, and it builds the kind of public record that matters for a recruiting profile later. For the broader landscape of how fan-driven and panel-driven awards differ across Kansas, the Kansas contest hub lines both formats up side by side. Zoom out further to the national fan-vote index, and it becomes clear panel selection like this banquet's is the less common setup nationally, not the default.

If what you actually want is a program where public support and vote volume move the outcome, Kansas has two: the Catchy Awards for prep sports statewide, and the DiRenna Awards for Kansas City-area basketball. Both take real votes. The general mechanics of running a fan-vote campaign, on a ballot that actually has one, are covered in the online contest voting guide, and the legality overview is worth reading before using any outside push on a program built that way. Structured support services such as fan-poll vote support apply to those public ballots, not to a media-panel banquet like this one.