Aroostook County Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

One county, one ballot, a completely different pool from the rest of Maine

Two Maine athlete-of-the-week polls run at the same time, and they don't share a single nominee. 92.9 The Ticket's statewide vote pulls from schools across the entire state. Big Country 96.9 in Presque Isle runs a second, separate poll, one that only nominates Aroostook County athletes: kids from Presque Isle, Caribou, Fort Kent, Madawaska, Houlton, and the towns between them. A Caribou senior can turn up on the County ballot some week and never appear on the statewide one at all, and the reverse happens just as often. That split matters more here than it might in a smaller state. Aroostook County covers roughly 6,800 square miles, more land than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, and it sits far enough from Maine's population centers that a County school's best week can get buried on a ballot built for Portland and Bangor media markets too. Big Country 96.9's poll exists precisely so that doesn't happen. It's a local station giving County kids a County-sized stage. Northern Maine Community College sponsors the whole program, which is not incidental. NMCC sits in Presque Isle, pulls a real share of its incoming students from Aroostook County high schools, and gets its name in front of exactly that audience every week the poll runs. A step-by-step rundown of how a fan-vote campaign like this typically moves is in the online vote-buying guide.

The St. John Valley and southern Aroostook aren't really the same place

Fort Kent and Madawaska sit up in the St. John Valley, close enough to the New Brunswick border that French is still spoken in plenty of County households, a legacy of the Acadian communities that settled the region generations back. Houlton, down in southern Aroostook, is its own world, closer in feel to the rest of Maine, further from the Valley's particular French-Acadian identity. Presque Isle and Caribou sit in between, the County's commercial hubs. Big Country 96.9's ballot doesn't care about that geography when it picks nominees. A St. John Valley athlete and a Houlton athlete can land on the same week's poll, two communities that are close to two hours apart by road and culturally distinct in ways a statewide Maine ballot would never surface. That's not a flaw in the format; it's the whole reason a county-specific poll exists instead of just deferring to the statewide one. What that means for anyone trying to build a real vote total: a St. John Valley nominee draws on a tight, often bilingual community network that shows up hard for its own, while a Houlton or Presque Isle nominee is pulling from a larger, more spread-out fan base. Neither is automatically the advantage. Fan poll vote support covers the general mechanics of building turnout on this kind of open ballot, and the same-state, statewide-scoped sibling poll is Maine High School Athlete of the Week, worth checking if a County athlete happens to be nominated on both at once.

What the weekly cycle actually looks like across three seasons

The poll doesn't lock to one sport. Fall brings football, cross country, and soccer nominees, the same season covered on a statewide scale by Maine High School Football Player of the Week. Winter shifts to basketball and wrestling. Spring turns over to track, baseball, and softball. What stays fixed through all three seasons is the county-only pool and the weekly format itself, a new poll, a new field of Aroostook County nominees, most weeks the relevant season is active. Big Country 96.9 doesn't publish a running vote count on its current poll pages, so nobody outside the newsroom knows how close last week's Caribou-versus-Presque-Isle race actually was. That's a real gap in what the organizer shares, and worth naming rather than glossing over. What is confirmed, every week, is the winner's name, school, and the fact that Northern Maine Community College's name rides along with the announcement. For families weighing whether a paid push makes sense on a ballot like this, the honest answer depends on the week: a wide-open field with several County schools nominated behaves differently than a week with only two or three names on it. Sports fan-poll vote support exists for stretches where an organic network alone isn't enough, and every Maine sports poll built on this site sits together at the Maine contest hub, part of the wider USA contest directory.