New Orleans Area High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing casual voters get wrong about this poll

Most fans assume a weekly athlete poll closes on Sunday. For the statewide SI Louisiana ballot, that is correct. For this one, it is not. NOLA.com's New Orleans area Athlete of the Week closes Thursday at noon — and that single fact reshapes how any campaign needs to be planned.

Nominations land with Christopher Dabe by Sunday evening. The ballot goes up early in the week. Thursday noon is the hard stop. That is a five-day window, not a seven-day one, and the last morning — Wednesday into Thursday — is where votes that haven't been cast yet either get made or don't.

There is a second thing worth knowing: this poll covers every LHSAA sport except football. Basketball in January. Softball and baseball in the spring. Soccer, volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, track, wrestling, tennis — all on the same rotating ballot, depending on what's in season. If your school's candidate is a basketball player in February going up against a track athlete whose season just started, the communities backing each sport are not the same size. The sport with a larger active booster base in that particular week has a structural edge.

No confirmed winner names from this ballot are publicly indexed at this time — NOLA.com limits direct content access, and the nominee data is not aggregated anywhere separate from the original articles. That is not a gap in the poll's legitimacy; it is a gap in what is retrievable. The poll has run continuously across multiple confirmed weeks in 2025 and 2026.

The five parishes, and what they mean for fan mobilization

Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, River Parishes. That is the defined boundary. It is a geographically compact region by Louisiana standards — you can drive corner to corner in under two hours — but its internal social topology is anything but uniform.

Orleans Parish holds some of the region's oldest and most identity-driven school communities. St. Augustine's Purple Knights and Brother Martin's Crusaders draw on alumni networks that track their programs closely across sports, not just football. Edna Karr, the Div I Select football champion with a 27-game win streak heading into the 2025 state finals, carries a community that mobilizes fast across all sports when the school is in contention. That kind of institutional attention does not turn off when football ends.

Jefferson Parish schools like Rummel and Archbishop Shaw are large enough to have broad alumni networks but dispersed enough that those networks activate more slowly on a Thursday noon deadline than a smaller, tighter school community might. The River Parishes — St. Charles, St. John, St. James — tend to produce smaller candidate fields but more concentrated voting. Destrehan and Hahnville have shown in the NOLA.com football POTW that their fan bases can move quickly when given a link and a deadline.

St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes are smaller in population. A strong candidate from a parish like Plaquemines going up against an Orleans or Jefferson school is not outmatched by default — but reaching voters outside the immediate school community takes deliberate effort in a five-day window.

How to put an athlete on the ballot and keep the campaign alive

Getting a nomination in matters more than most supporters realize. Contact Christopher Dabe at [email protected] before 5 p.m. Sunday with the athlete's name, school, sport, and what they did that week. The organizer builds the ballot early in the next week — a nomination that arrives Monday morning might miss the cutoff entirely.

Once the poll is live, the math is simple: the article link is the poll. Sharing the link gets votes; sharing a screenshot does not. A team group chat that circulates the article on Monday gives supporters four full days to return to it. A post that goes up Wednesday afternoon gives them one morning.

The Thursday noon close is not well-known outside the most engaged prep sports communities. That information gap is an advantage. A campaign that starts Monday and reminds on Wednesday is operating in a window most rival supporters are not actively working. For year-round multi-sport polls like this one, the approach is the same regardless of season — reach more people with the link before noon Thursday.

How Louisiana's other weekly prep sports fan-vote polls are structured is covered at /usa/louisiana/. The full national directory of weekly fan-vote guides lives at /usa/. For open public polls like this one, vote support options and targeted sports fan-poll vote services exist for supporters who want to extend their reach before Thursday arrives.