Central Maine Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why a Cony or Waterville nominee isn't automatically on the Maine poll you found first

At least four other weekly ballots use almost the same name. Bangor Daily News runs one for Penobscot, Hancock, and Aroostook counties. Portland Press Herald's Varsity Maine desk runs a separate one for Cumberland, York, and Androscoggin. Big Country 96.9 in Presque Isle runs a county-only ballot sponsored by Northern Maine Community College. And 92.9 The Ticket runs a statewide version out of Bangor, open to every MPA class and region. None of those four is the one CentralMaine.com runs for Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel readers.

This is that one. A Cony nominee out of Augusta or a Waterville Senior High School athlete doesn't show up on the Bangor Daily News ballot just because both papers cover sports in the same state. Kennebec and Somerset counties sit outside BDN's Northern Maine footprint and outside Press Herald's Southern Maine counties too. CentralMaine.com, under the same Maine Trust for Local News ownership as the Press Herald, runs its own separate program specifically for this stretch of the state.

Overlap is still possible in one direction. Because the statewide 92.9 The Ticket ballot draws nominees from every MPA class and region, a Kennebec or Somerset county athlete on the CentralMaine.com ballot could, in principle, also turn up the same week on the statewide fall ballot, or on the Aroostook-only side if a family has ties to The County. The programs don't coordinate with each other; a family running a campaign should check each site's current post rather than assume one submission covers both.

The full roster of Maine's reader and fan-vote polls, sport and otherwise, is easiest to browse from the Maine contest hub.

What CentralMaine.com has confirmed for 2025, and what it hasn't published

Fifteen weeks. That's the total confirmed voting window across the 2025 cycle once the three seasons are added up: Fall runs weeks 3 through 11, Winter covers only weeks 2 and 3, and Spring runs weeks 1 through 4. Nine fall weeks, two winter weeks, four spring weeks.

The gaps are as informative as the confirmed dates. Fall doesn't start at week 1; the ballot picks up in week 3, after the season's opening slate has already been played. Winter is the narrowest window on the calendar, just two weeks, a fraction of a full basketball or wrestling season. Spring stops at week 4, well before Maine's late-May state tournament dates. Nothing in the public record explains why the cycle is shaped that way. It may reflect newsroom capacity more than anything about the sports themselves.

One more honest gap: there's no searchable archive of past Central Maine winners in the public record, and no confirmed nomination email address. Readers researching a prior winner or trying to submit an athlete are better off going straight to the current post on CentralMaine.com's sports section than searching for a standing submission form that may not exist.

How does the Saturday announcement compare with Maine's other newspaper ballots?

Saturday. That's the one scheduling detail CentralMaine.com has published clearly: the week's Athlete of the Week goes up Saturday. Bangor Daily News's Northern Maine ballot, by contrast, closes voting Thursday evening, the rhythm most Maine prep-sports readers expect from a weekly poll. Nothing in the confirmed record says when CentralMaine.com's own voting window closes, only that the winner is named Saturday.

The unpublished details matter more than the published one for anyone planning a campaign. No per-device vote cap appears anywhere in the confirmed record, unlike the county-only Aroostook ballot or the statewide 92.9 Ticket poll, both of which post specific rules on their own pages. Treat the live post at CentralMaine.com as the only current source for whatever limit applies in a given week. A newspaper poll's terms can shift between seasons without much announcement.

Because Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel share a parent company with the Press Herald, it's tempting to assume the ballots run on identical software with identical rules. Nothing in the public record confirms that. Maine Trust for Local News operates its mastheads separately enough that the Southern Maine ballot and this Central Maine one are documented as distinct programs, not one system wearing two names.

The schools that actually feed this ballot

Augusta anchors the northern edge of Kennebec County and happens to be Maine's state capital, a fact that doesn't change any athlete's odds but keeps Cony High School's programs in the same newsroom's orbit for reasons that have nothing to do with sports. Waterville, home to Colby College and Waterville Senior High School, anchors the county's other pole about eighteen miles north.

Between and around those two cities sit a dozen smaller districts that round out the nominee pool most weeks: Gardiner, Winthrop, Hall-Dale in Hallowell, Monmouth Academy, Maranacook in Readfield, Erskine Academy in South China, Messalonskee in Oakland, and Winslow. Cross into Somerset County and Skowhegan, the county seat, adds its own athletic programs alongside Lawrence High School in neighboring Fairfield.

No single town runs the table here. Kennebec and Somerset counties don't have a school with an enrollment advantage steep enough to guarantee a nominee's spot in any given week. Cony and Skowhegan are the two largest programs in the footprint, but Gardiner, Winthrop, and the smaller academies field competitive teams most seasons. A ballot pulling from a dozen-plus towns this size tends to reward whichever school's parents and staff actually see the post and share it, not raw enrollment.

Nominating an athlete, then working a week with no published cap

Start before the ballot goes live. CentralMaine.com's sports desk builds each week's field from performances readers and coaches flag to them; the paper hasn't published a standing nomination email the way some of Maine's other polls have, so the safest path is checking the current Athlete of the Week post on CentralMaine.com's sports section for that week's submission instructions rather than guessing at an address. A submission that names the athlete's school, sport, opponent, and a specific stat line gives an editor something concrete to work with.

Once voting opens, the honest answer is that nobody outside the newsroom has published exactly how the per-device rule works this cycle. That cuts against giving specific tactical advice about vote counts. What's safe to say: getting the direct link to that week's post, not just the CentralMaine.com homepage, in front of the team's group chat, the booster list, and school social accounts early in the week gives real people more days to find it and vote, whatever the underlying limit turns out to be. For the general playbook on running a fan-vote week, the how-to hub covers tactics that apply regardless of platform. A Thursday-night push has less runway than a Monday one before a Saturday result.

Two other Maine reader polls run entirely separately from this weekly sports ballot and are worth knowing about for a Central Maine family that follows local news beyond athletics: Best of the 207, NewsCenter Maine's annual business awards, and Down East's Best of Maine, both running on yearly cycles with no connection to prep sports. For how fan-vote polls in general are structured and scored, the online contest voting guide covers mechanics that apply across platforms, and this breakdown of the legal side of buying votes is worth reading before using any outside service. Families who've exhausted their organic network sometimes turn to vote-support services built for sports fan polls; the same paced, real-voter approach that works within a published cap is the only approach that makes sense against an unpublished one too.