Maine High School Athlete of the Week — Fall Season: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three fan polls compete for Maine prep athletes each fall — and this one isn't the others

Three different weekly fan polls touch Maine high school sports each fall, and mixing them up costs a campaign real votes. The 92.9 The Ticket Athlete of the Week, Townsquare Media's Bangor sports-radio poll, pulls nominees from every MPA class and every fall sport, caps voting at one per device per day, and closes Thursday at midnight with a Friday announcement. That is the poll this page covers.

Two others run in the same state during the same months but work nothing like it. The Aroostook County Athlete of the Week, hosted by Big Country 96.9 out of Presque Isle and sponsored by Northern Maine Community College, draws only from Aroostook County schools: Presque Isle, Caribou, Fort Kent, Madawaska, Houlton, a separate nominee pool the statewide poll never touches. High School on SI's Maine Boys Basketball Player of the Week, run by SBLive, doesn't open until the winter season starts in mid-November. It has no overlap with a fall campaign on the calendar, though both polls run under very different cap rules worth knowing if a fall nominee's family later follows an athlete into a winter sport.

The overlap that actually matters: an Aroostook County football nominee could in theory appear on both the county-only Big Country ballot and the statewide 92.9 Ticket ballot in the same week. They aren't mutually exclusive, so a family running a fall campaign should check the Aroostook County poll's rules separately rather than assume one campaign covers both. For the full roster of Maine's recognition polls, including the winter basketball edition, the Maine contest hub lays out what's active month by month.

Fall means football volume, but the ballot never separates by sport

Football drives the numbers. Of the sports that populate the fall ballot (football, cross country, soccer, volleyball, and golf), football nominees pull the largest single-week totals. That traces to Friday-night attendance and booster-list size, not anything built into the poll's rules. The mechanic itself doesn't care what sport a nominee plays.

That's worth stating plainly because it surprises people: a Class A South lineman and a Class C girls' golf nominee can land on the exact same Monday-through-Thursday ballot, competing for the same single weekly title. No sport-specific bracket exists. No classification adjustment gets applied to the final count. The winner is whoever collects the most votes by Thursday midnight, full stop; cross country included, golf included.

None of that means a cross country or golf nominee can't win. It means the ceiling on football weeks tends to run higher because more households are already paying attention on a Friday night. The poll doesn't create that imbalance; it just doesn't correct for it either.

The mechanics don't change for fall, the calendar just gets busier

Nothing about the platform itself shifts once football starts. The cap stays at one vote per device per day. Voting still opens early in the week, usually Monday or Tuesday once the sports staff has reviewed weekend results, and closes at midnight Thursday. Friday's announcement still runs on 929theticket.com and during on-air segments.

What changes is submission volume. Coaches, parents, and fans email or submit nominations through the form at 929theticket.com in far greater numbers during football's roughly eleven-week stretch than during golf's shorter window. That means the editorial bar for a nomination standing out is higher in October than in a quiet cross country week. A submission with the athlete's school, sport, opposing team, and a specific stat line (yards, kills, goals, strokes) competes better against a crowded football-heavy field than a bare name-and-school entry does.

The daily cap arithmetic doesn't move either. One device, voting Monday through Thursday, produces four legitimate votes across the window. A household running three phones and a laptop through all four days adds up to sixteen. None of that changes whether the nominee plays football or field hockey; it's the same four-day math every week of the season. What changes in football weeks is how many separate households are actually doing that math at once.

Why Thornton Academy, Cheverus, and Scarborough carry outsized weight once football starts

Class A South carries Maine's largest, most organized booster infrastructure, and three programs in particular carry outsized weight once fall football gets rolling: Thornton Academy in Saco, Cheverus in Portland, and Scarborough. All three run established Class A South programs with active parent-booster networks and school athletics accounts that reach well past the current roster.

Under a daily cap, that infrastructure matters less for raw device count and more for how quickly a booster list converts into people actually returning to the poll Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, not just clicking once on Monday and forgetting. Thornton's booster network is built around one of the state's more established athletic programs and typically moves fast once a nomination goes up. Cheverus draws on a Portland-metro alumni base that tends to stay local and check the athletic department's social feed regularly. Scarborough's network is smaller in absolute reach but organized tightly enough to sustain engagement across all four voting days.

None of that guarantees a Class A South win in any given week. A Class B or C school with a faster-moving, more centralized parent network can outperform a larger program that's slow to mobilize past day one, the same dynamic the statewide poll shows across every season, not just fall. But across a full football stretch, these three programs turn up in the nominee pool, and near the top of the vote count, with enough regularity that a campaign planning against a Class A South opponent should assume that program already has its booster list primed before the ballot even goes live.

Running a fall campaign inside the rules

Start with the nomination, not the vote count. A submission through the form or email at 929theticket.com that names the athlete, school, sport, opponent, and a specific stat line, not just "had a great game", is what gets a fall nominee onto a crowded football-season ballot in the first place. Submitting early in the week beats submitting after the post is already live; once the ballot publishes, that week's field is set.

Once voting opens, the daily cap makes breadth the only lever that consistently moves a fall total. Getting the direct poll link (the specific post, not the 929theticket.com homepage) in front of the team group chat, the booster email list, and the school's athletics social account on Monday does more than any single-day push later in the week. A Wednesday reminder catches people whose Monday vote has already reset. For general fan-vote mechanics that apply beyond this one poll, the online contest voting guide covers the fundamentals; the legal and terms-of-service side of paid vote support is addressed directly in this breakdown of buying votes for online contests.

When a campaign has exhausted its organic network and a Class A South opponent's booster list is still outpacing it, some families turn to a paid outreach service built for capped fan polls. Vote-support services for sports fan polls exist for exactly this scenario. The distinction that matters is cap-matched, paced delivery from real voters, not scripted requests that spike outside the daily rhythm and get flagged. Maine has two other statewide reader polls worth knowing about outside sports: Best of the 207 and Down East's Best of Maine, though both run on an annual, business-category cycle entirely separate from this weekly athlete poll.