Topeka Capital-Journal High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The close time is the one thing most voters get wrong

Not midnight. Not Sunday night. The Topeka Capital-Journal ballot closes at noon — midday — and not always on the same day of the week. Fall 2024 weeks consistently closed Thursday at noon; the December 2025 winter-season article closed Friday at noon instead. That shift is confirmed across two separate seasons, which means the safe assumption is: check the article, every time.

The practical consequence is sharper than it sounds. If your athlete's fan base is planning a Wednesday-evening push, and the ballot closed Wednesday at noon, that push was four hours too late. The decisive window for this poll runs Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning — not the night before the deadline, which is the default mental model for most weekly polls.

The Capital-Journal does not publish raw vote totals, so there is no public record of how close past races ran or what total typically wins. What the record does show is which schools and athletes have converted support into wins repeatedly — and those schools cluster around Washburn Rural and Seaman, which have produced more confirmed winners in the available record than any other programs in the Topeka metro.

What the Fall 2024 record actually shows

Nine confirmed winners across Fall 2024 is enough to see a pattern. Washburn Rural placed on multiple ballots across football, cross country, and swimming. Topeka West's Adrian Lehman won the cross country slot twice — September 2-7 and October 28-November 2 — which confirms the organizer allows repeat winners in the same season. Seaman football appeared in two separate October weeks. Hayden won the golf-and-tennis combination week of October 21-26.

The sport distribution matters. Of the nine confirmed winners, six were cross country or non-football sports. The Capital-Journal ballot is not a football award with other sports tucked on the side; it is a genuinely multi-sport competition where a cross-country runner or a golfer can win the same week a quarterback with two touchdown passes is also nominated. That flattens the playing field across seasons — and means any school's best individual athlete, regardless of sport, belongs on the ballot.

The October 28 nominee list shows the geographic range the ballot pulls from: Rossville (2A, Shawnee County rural), Seaman (5A, north Topeka), Washburn Rural (5A, southwest Topeka), Topeka West (6A, USD 501), Hayden (4A, private Catholic), and Maegan Mills of Seaman volleyball. Six nominees from four different KSHSAA classifications and three different school types — public, rural public, private Catholic. Enrollment and classification do not filter this ballot.

Topeka's school landscape and what it means for a vote campaign

The Topeka metro has a tighter, more layered school geography than most Kansas markets. USD 501 runs three large public high schools — Topeka High, Highland Park, Topeka West — inside the city limits. Washburn Rural and Seaman sit just outside on the suburban edge. Hayden Catholic draws a distinct Catholic-community network across Shawnee County. Then there are the small-district schools: Silver Lake (2A, about 200 students) and Rossville, both of which have produced Capital- Journal nominees in recent seasons.

Hayden is worth its own sentence. A 4A Catholic school competing against 5A and 6A public programs, Hayden's alumni network is unusually tight — Kailyn Hanni of Silver Lake and Caleb Menke of Hayden both made the December 2025 winter ballot against 5A-6A programs, and Izzy Glotzbach of Hayden won the October 21-26 2024 week. Catholic-alumni chains in Topeka tend to activate faster on community recognition votes than dispersed public-school networks of the same nominal size. That's not a theory — the win record supports it.

Washburn Rural's repeated appearances suggest a booster culture that stays engaged across sports and seasons, not just football. A school that shows up in football, cross country, swimming, and soccer ballots in the same record is one whose community watches the award year-round. Competing against Rural in any sport means competing against a community that already has the poll link saved.

Getting a nomination in, and moving votes before noon

The nomination step is underused. Liam Keating at [email protected] — or @liamkeating7 on X — takes submissions from coaches, parents, and fans. A message that arrives early in the week with the athlete's name, school, sport, opponent, date, and full stat line gives Keating what he needs to write the nominee entry. A great performance that nobody flags can miss the ballot entirely, and that is the step most supporters skip.

Once the article is up, the clock starts. The Gannett widget can load slowly on mobile under heavy ad traffic — if the poll doesn't appear immediately, scrolling past the first ad break or switching to a desktop browser usually resolves it. No account is required to vote.

The window that actually matters is Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning. That is when a real reminder push — team group chats, parent networks, a school booster post — reaches people who still have time to open cjonline.com and vote before the noon close. Because the Capital- Journal does not publish running totals, there is no way to know how far ahead or behind your athlete is until the winner is announced. That uncertainty is the argument for starting early rather than waiting to see if you need to push. For campaigns that want to move the number more substantially, vote-support services are built for exactly this kind of open, weekly newspaper poll.

The Capital-Journal poll is one of two confirmed Kansas metro athlete votes running concurrently. The statewide Kansas High School Athlete of the Week (Hy-Vee / KSHB 41) covers all KSHSAA classifications across the state at kshb.com — a Topeka-area athlete who wins the Capital-Journal ballot may also appear on that statewide field. For how recurring fan votes work in general, the how-to guide covers the weekly cadence. The full national directory is at /usa/.