Shreveport Times High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters don't know coming in

The Shreveport Times Athlete of the Week is not a football poll. That is not a footnote — it is the entire premise, and it changes how every campaign here has to run.

Football in Northwest Louisiana carries its own gravitational pull. Airline, Parkway, Bossier, Captain Shreve — those programs pull the attention on Friday nights, and that attention brings built-in turnout. This poll is for everyone else. The softball pitcher who threw a one-hitter on Tuesday. The gymnast who won the regional all-around. The track kid who ran a personal-best 300m hurdle at a mid-week meet. Those athletes show up on this ballot, and their fan bases are real — just smaller by default, which makes how those bases are activated the whole story.

Voting closes Friday night, announced Sunday. The Shreveport Times has run confirmed ballots through Week 36 of the 2025-26 school year, covering softball, baseball, track, gymnastics, and tennis on the same ballot in spring weeks. The field varies week by week: one week it is eight track athletes; the next it is five softball nominees and seven baseball players. No account is needed to vote.

What the confirmed nominee lists reveal about competition

Three confirmed ballot weeks show the shape of the field. In Week 33 (spring 2026): five softball nominees, seven baseball nominees, three track athletes — 15 total across Caddo Magnet, Airline, Ruston, Parkway, Logansport, Benton, Northwood, Byrd, Loyola, Haughton, Captain Shreve, North DeSoto, BTW, Providence, and North Caddo. In Week 34, two Evangel gymnasts, three softball players, five track athletes, and five baseball players appeared together. In Week 36, eight track nominees, three baseball players, three softball players, and a tennis nominee from Caddo Magnet ran on one ballot.

The practical implication is vote splitting. A week with eight track athletes from different schools is not a week where one running back's fan base votes in a bloc. Those 15+ nominees mean the vote often fragments across sports and schools, and the winner is frequently whoever had the most coordinated early push — not the highest-profile athlete on the list.

One pattern worth noting: Evangel and Calvary Baptist, the region's prominent private schools, appear in multiple confirmed weeks across gymnastics, baseball, and softball. Their alumni networks are active and accustomed to supporting school athletics. Public programs from Airline, Byrd, Captain Shreve, and Parkway also appear regularly — the full Caddo- Bossier prep ecosystem shows up here, not just one tier of it.

Why Friday night is the only deadline that matters

The closing time is what sets this poll apart from every other Louisiana prep fan vote on the map. The SI statewide Athlete of the Week closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific — campaigns there have the full weekend. The NOLA.com and Advocate Baton Rouge polls close at noon on Thursday or Wednesday, giving campaigns only the first half of the school week. The Shreveport Times closes Friday night.

That means the decisive window runs from Monday through Friday afternoon. A school that posts the link at Monday lunch and keeps circulating it through Thursday — team group chats, boosters, parents, alumni — has five full days of momentum before the deadline. A school that waits until Thursday has maybe 36 hours. In a field of 15 nominees, that gap decides most weeks.

The winner gets something the other three polls don't offer: a Raising Cane's backpack and boxed lunch, plus swag from the Shreveport-Bossier Sports Commission and Cosse and Silmon Orthodontics. A feature story runs Sunday. For a basketball player or a softball pitcher whose sport gets two paragraphs on a football-heavy sports page, that Sunday feature is a meaningful piece of recognition — and schools know it.

Running a campaign in NW Louisiana's non-football landscape

The softball or baseball program that wants to win this poll faces a different challenge than a football program would. Football has a weekly rhythm everyone already follows — parents at Friday games, boosters tracking the score, alumni checking in. A spring-sport athlete's support network is real but less automatically activated. It has to be assembled deliberately, and the Friday deadline means that work starts Monday.

The poll syndicates out to Yahoo Sports and AOL alongside the native shreveporttimes.com embed. That is worth knowing because linking directly to shreveporttimes.com can hit paywalls for some readers, while the Yahoo Sports version of the poll is often open without a subscription. Sharing the Yahoo or AOL link instead can meaningfully widen the reach — the votes count the same, and you're not losing supporters at the paywall gate.

For a sport like gymnastics or tennis, where the school-wide community may not know the athlete as well as they'd know a varsity football starter, the campaign often has to start with the team itself: athletes sharing for each other, coaches nudging parents, the booster group that normally handles football fundraising getting a specific ask. Because the field is wide and votes split across sports, even a modest coordinated push from one program can land a win. For more on how open prep fan votes work, the how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence for recurring fan polls; the Louisiana contests guide covers the full state picture; and the national /usa/ directory maps every regional poll by state. When a school's built-in network needs a boost, vote-support campaigns are built for open public polls that close on a hard deadline.