Who is the Monroe News-Star's boys Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the boys Athlete of the Year award is and who runs it

The Monroe News-Star's boys Athlete of the Year is a reader-decided high school sports award run by The News-Star, the daily newspaper published in Monroe, Louisiana. Readers know the masthead by its market name, and the award functions as the publisher's year-end reader honor for boys high school athletics in northeast Louisiana.

Crowdsignal hosts the vote, reached through its poll.fm address. The confirmed ballot for the 2025-26 school year sits at poll.fm/17147164, under the question "Who is the Monroe News-Star's boys Athlete of the Year for 2025-26?". The format is a straight public poll: nominees appear as answers, a supporter picks a nominee and submits, and the newspaper closes the poll when its window ends.

Nominees come from high schools across northeast Louisiana, a footprint that makes this a regional contest rather than a statewide award. The honor also spans a full school year of boys athletics, which separates it from the weekly honors other Louisiana publishers and stations run during their own seasons.

Ownership is the fact worth underlining. Crowdsignal supplies the polling technology, but The News-Star supplies everything else: the nominee list, the window, the close and the result. Any rule a supporter needs to know is the newspaper's rule, not the platform's.

Editions, the June 2026 window and what is not published

Confirmed editions of this award sit in 2025 and 2026. The 2026 edition covers the 2025-26 school season, and its ballot ran in June 2026 under the title "Who is the Monroe News-Star's boys Athlete of the Year for 2025-26?", now marked "(Poll Closed)". With that ballot shut, a 2027 cycle is the natural next step, but the publisher has posted no schedule for it.

The closed poll's results are public. The leading finisher on the 2025-26 boys ballot took 48 percent, or 18,313 votes, figures the poll page displays for each nominee once voting ends.

Just as useful is what the ballot leaves out. No dated open and close points for the June window appear on it, no category list beyond the boys award itself is published, and no per-supporter voting rule is stated anywhere on the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher has not announced any preliminary or final round dates either, so the whole cycle rests on the ballot the newspaper posts at its own pace.

Because the award is keyed to a school year rather than a calendar year, the ballot's question spans 2025-26 even though the voting fell inside June 2026. That quirk matters when searching: a supporter looking for the current cycle should try both the season label and the calendar year.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

Reader polls rarely get simpler than this one. A supporter opens the ballot at poll.fm/17147164, reads the nominee list under the question "Who is the Monroe News-Star's boys Athlete of the Year for 2025-26?", picks the athlete he or she wishes to support, and sends the form off. The page shows no login prompt and no account requirement, so the vote is open to any reader who reaches it while the poll is live.

The ballot prints no repeat-voting rule. Whether poll.fm applies any per-device or per-day limit on this particular poll goes unmentioned, so a supporter intending to return should rely on what the live form shows rather than on an assumption brought over from a different contest.

Right now the 2025-26 poll is closed, so there is nothing to vote on until the publisher posts the next ballot. When that edition opens, the newspaper will publish its own link, and that link is the address to use, since a stale poll.fm page from a past cycle cannot accept a new vote.

Timing matters for a different reason too. Anyone hoping to take part in the next cycle should watch the newspaper's sports coverage toward the end of the school year, which is when the dated ballot appeared, rather than hunting for the award in the middle of a fall football season.

How this ballot sits beside its Louisiana neighbours

This award is not the only Louisiana public-vote program of its kind. Six sibling programs share the state with it: the Baton Rouge High School Athlete of the Week, the Louisiana High School Football Player of the Week, the New Orleans Area High School Athlete of the Week, the New Orleans Area Prep Football Player of the Week, the Shreveport Times High School Athlete of the Week and the WAFB Sportsline Player of the Week, which belongs to the Baton Rouge station WAFB.

Each of those honors runs weekly during its season, and each is tied to its own publisher or station and its own market. This award stands apart in every respect. It is annual rather than weekly, it covers boys athletes across the sports the newspaper's nominees represent rather than a single sport, and its market is the Monroe paper's readership area in northeast Louisiana rather than Baton Rouge, New Orleans or Shreveport.

The publisher split matters too. The Shreveport Times program belongs to that city's newspaper, the WAFB honor to a television station, and the New Orleans pair to their own local outlets, while the statewide football honor answers to its own editorship. None of them shares a ballot, a platform decision or a rule sheet with the Monroe award, so a rule learned on a neighbour's page does not transfer here.

The cadence gap is what a supporter feels most. A weekly honor gives a nominee a fresh chance each week, while a year-end award concentrates the whole contest into a short window at the end of the school year, which raises the stakes of how widely the poll link travels.

Building support for a nominee on this ballot

Support on this ballot travels the way newspaper poll support does: through the link. The poll.fm address is short, the nominee list is public, and a nominee's strongest asset is a school community willing to pass the URL along, whether that is a Ruston booster page, a Sterlington class group or a Mangham family chat.

The organizer's own position on outside help is simply absent: the ballot page publishes no statement about vote sources, software or purchased support. That silence cuts both ways, since it sets no published ceiling on how supporters rally but also offers no protection if the publisher later objects to a push it never wrote a rule about.

For a fuller picture of the options, the guide to getting more votes online covers organic and paid routes side by side, and the award-votes page speaks to ballots like this year-end honor specifically. Neither promises an outcome; the poll's own arithmetic decides that.