Wichita ESPYs Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why the Wichita ESPYs ballot doesn't look like a typical prep-sports poll

Most fan-vote sports polls stay in their lane. A high school poll stays high school. A college poll stays college. ESPN Wichita 92.3 and 810 WHB-AM don't split it that way. The Honorary ESPYs put a high schooler, a Newman University sophomore, and a Wichita pro athlete on categories that sit on the same ballot page, decided in the same June ceremony. That's the structural quirk worth understanding before anything else about this program.

It grows out of the station's format. Sports-talk radio in a mid-size market like Wichita covers everything from Friday night football to Wichita State basketball to whatever local pro athletes the city claims, often in the same three-hour block. A ballot that mirrors the on-air lineup (prep, small college, pro, side by side) is a fairly direct translation of what the station already talks about daily. Compare that to the Catchy Awards, KWCH 12's statewide prep-only ballot broadcast out of the same city: same June timing, same Wichita media market, completely different scope. One stays inside KSHSAA classifications. The other crosses amateur and pro lines entirely.

What that means for anyone trying to support a nominee: the competition for attention isn't just against other schools in your category. It's against a Wichita State product, a small-college standout, and a professional athlete all pulling from the same station's audience during the same voting window. Attention is the scarce resource here, not the vote count itself. The Wichita Eagle's Best of Wichita readers-choice ballot runs on the same annual cadence but never touches sports at all, and the Best of Johnson County awards apply that same business-vote format two hours east in the Kansas City metro. This state runs more than one fan-driven ballot a year.

What the Honorary ESPYs categories actually cover

Confirmed categories include High School Male Athlete of the Year, High School Female Athlete of the Year, Small College Male Athlete of the Year, Small College Female Athlete of the Year, and Professional Athlete of the Year. The station runs roughly eight to ten categories total in a given cycle, which means two to five slots beyond those five aren't itemized in what the station publishes ahead of the live ballot, most likely additional splits by sport, coach recognition, or a moment-of-the-year type category, but that's not confirmed, so treat it as an open gap rather than a guess. Check the current ballot at 810whb.com for the exact list in any given year.

Splitting High School and Small College by gender, then running Professional as one combined slot, tells you something about scale. There's enough depth in prep and small-college sports locally to support two categories each. The professional pool in a market Wichita's size is thin enough that one combined category covers it. There simply aren't ten pro athletes with Wichita ties competing for attention in a given year the way there are dozens of eligible juniors and seniors across Sedgwick County high schools. The broader Kansas contest hub lists the state's other active fan-vote programs alongside this one.

How the June ceremony timeline and 810whb.com ballot work

The mechanism itself is straightforward: a public fan vote at 810whb.com, open to anyone, with the winners named at a ceremony held each June. What the station hasn't published, at least not anywhere publicly confirmable, is a specific vote cap, an exact opening date, or a documented nomination process for how names land on the ballot in the first place. That's worth saying plainly rather than filling the gap with a plausible-sounding number. Confirm the live rules directly on 810whb.com before you build any voting plan around an assumed cap.

No account is required to participate, going by how the station describes the mechanism publicly: a standard setup for a station-run fan vote, and consistent with how 810 WHB and its ESPN Wichita brand operate the rest of their audience engagement. Because the exact cadence (one vote total, once per day, unlimited) isn't stated, the safest working assumption is to treat each vote as counting once unless the live ballot explicitly says otherwise when you get there.

June is the fixed point. Everything else, when the ballot opens, how long voting runs, whether categories rotate year to year, moves around that fixed ceremony date. Anyone planning a push should build backward from June, not forward from an assumed launch date. For comparison, the national fan-vote index covers other June-timed ceremonies that run this same kind of open-ended voting window.

The Wichita-area schools and colleges that feed this ballot

Sedgwick County alone carries enough high school density to fill a Male and Female Athlete of the Year category several times over. Wichita East, Wichita Northwest, and Kapaun Mt. Carmel sit inside the city; Andover, Derby, and Maize ring the metro within a short drive. Add Wichita State's Division I program, plus the small-college cluster (Newman and Friends within Wichita city limits, Southwestern in Winfield, Bethel in North Newton, Sterling further west), and the Small College categories draw from a genuinely regional pool, not just one campus.

That geography matters for the vote itself. A candidate from a Wichita city school starts with built-in radio-audience overlap: 810 WHB's core listenership skews toward exactly the ZIP codes those schools sit in. A nominee from Winfield or Sterling, an hour or more from the Wichita city limits, is competing for the same Wichita-market attention from further outside the station's densest listening radius. Neither is disqualifying. It's just a different starting distance.

The Small College categories are the more unusual entries here. Most statewide Kansas prep polls, including the Catchy Awards ballot, stop at the high school line. Folding NAIA programs like Newman, Friends, Southwestern, Bethel, and Sterling into the same ceremony as a Wichita city high schooler is a scope decision few Kansas media outlets make.

What actually moves votes here, given how little the station publishes

Start with what's actually confirmed: this is a free public vote at a single URL, decided by however many people show up and click. No published cap, no published nomination form, no published prior-year tallies. That's a thinner data set than a lot of statewide polls offer, and it changes the playbook. You're not optimizing around a known six-hour reset window or a documented per-device limit; you're working from the assumption that the mechanism is closer to "each visit counts" until the live page says otherwise.

What does transfer from every other Wichita-market ballot: reach beats intensity. A school's booster group chat, a small college's alumni network, a family's group text: each is a channel that gets the direct 810whb.com link (not a vague "go vote for me" post) in front of someone who wasn't already planning to click. Newman and Friends both carry alumni bases that skew local; a Wichita State connection reaches people well outside city limits who still check in on hometown sports. None of that guarantees a win. It's simply the mechanism that moves a vote count when the vote count itself isn't published mid-cycle.

For a broader look at how fan-vote mechanics like this one work across platforms, the online contest voting guide covers the general landscape, and the legality overview addresses the question most people ask before using any outside push. If organic reach through school and alumni networks has been exhausted and the category is still close, structured fan-poll vote support exists for ballots of this type. Paced, human-pattern delivery is what keeps a push from tripping the kind of anomaly detection most station-run polls quietly run in the background.