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

Why Aroostook County's spring ballot looks different from every other week of the year

Track season changes who wins in Aroostook County. That's the fact worth knowing before anything else about the spring edition of Maine's Athlete of the Week poll. Football, basketball, even soccer all ask for facilities, rosters, and travel budgets that a 200-student school in far northern Maine struggles to match against Class A South programs three hours south. Outdoor track and field asks for a flat stretch of ground, a stopwatch, and a bus. That difference shows up on the ballot every spring.

The County (locals capitalize it that way, and outsiders learn fast why) spans roughly 6,800 square miles, more land than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, with a population small enough that Presque Isle, its largest city, counts under 9,000 residents. Towns like Fort Kent, Madawaska, Van Buren, and Ashland sit close enough to the Canadian border that some students grow up bilingual in English and Acadian French. That geography doesn't produce a big fan base in absolute terms. It produces a fan base that already knows every family on the team, because in a town of 900 people there usually isn't another option.

That density of connection is what lets Class C and D track programs from the County show up disproportionately on a statewide ballot they'd rarely crack in football. A meet result at Caribou or Houlton reaches every parent, cousin, and former classmate within a day, not through any marketing push, but because the town's group chats and the local Facebook pages are the same fifteen people who show up to everything. The Aroostook County Athlete of the Week, run separately by Big Country 96.9 out of Presque Isle, exists precisely because that regional identity is strong enough to support its own weekly poll — worth knowing before assuming the statewide 92.9 Ticket ballot is the only one a County nominee should chase.

What the spring ballot covers, and what the record can't tell you

Baseball, softball, outdoor track and field, tennis, and lacrosse fill the spring ballot once the snow clears, typically from mid-April through the MPA's June state meets. Track carries the widest geographic spread of any of them. A single Saturday invitational can pull competitors from a dozen schools across three or four MPA classes onto one results sheet, so a Class D 400-meter winner from Ashland and a Class A South sprinter from Scarborough can end up nominated the same week without ever having raced each other.

No searchable log of past spring winners exists anywhere on 929theticket.com. That gap is real, and it's worth saying plainly rather than papering over it with a guess. What is observable, week to week, is a pattern rather than a number: Aroostook-area track nominees appear on the ballot with a regularity that outpaces what the County's share of Maine's population alone would predict. That pattern specifically doesn't hold for the ballot's other spring sports; baseball and softball nominees skew toward the state's larger population centers, where travel teams and year-round leagues build deeper competitive pools. Track is the exception, and it traces straight back to what the sport requires versus what it rewards.

None of that is unique to this one poll, either. The fall edition of this same statewide ballot runs on football volume out of Class A South. Spring runs, in part, on a rural county's track depth. Same platform, same cap, a completely different geographic center of gravity depending on the season.

The mechanics stay the same; the season just runs to June

Nothing about the platform itself changes for spring. The cap holds at one vote per device per day. The window still opens midweek, usually Monday or Tuesday once the sports desk has reviewed the weekend's meets and games, and closes Thursday at midnight, with the winner named in a Friday post on 929theticket.com.

What shifts is submission behavior, not the rules. Coaches and parents send in fewer nominations during a quiet tennis week than during football's eleven-week fall stretch, so the editorial bar for standing out is, in practice, lower in a mid-May track week than in a crowded October football one. A submission naming the athlete, school, event or stat line (a specific time, a specific hit total, a specific opponent) still beats a bare name-and-school entry, spring or fall.

The daily-cap arithmetic doesn't move with the calendar. One device voting Monday through Thursday produces four legitimate votes. A household running three phones and a laptop through the full window adds up to sixteen. That math is identical whether the nominee runs the 400 hurdles in Ashland or plays third base in Bangor. What changes by season is how many households are actually doing it.

Two ballots, one county — reading the overlap correctly

A County track athlete can, in principle, show up on two different ballots in the same week, and treating them as one campaign is a mistake that costs real votes. The statewide 92.9 Ticket poll draws nominees from every MPA class and every region in Maine, Aroostook included, under the daily cap covered above. The separate Aroostook County Athlete of the Week, hosted by Big Country 96.9 and sponsored by Northern Maine Community College, only ever pulls from County schools, and its voting window and rules live on a different site entirely.

Those two ballots don't share a nominee pool, a cap, or a close time, so a family whose athlete lands on both needs to check the Maine contest hub for the current status of each poll rather than assume one link covers both. Sharing the wrong URL (the Big Country tag page instead of the 929theticket.com post, or the reverse) is one of the more common ways a County campaign loses votes it should have had.

Neither poll requires anything beyond a click to participate, and neither one should be confused with legal risk. Structured outreach to real voters is addressed directly in this breakdown of the legal side of buying votes for online contests, which applies to both the statewide and the County-only ballot the same way.

Running a spring campaign around a County-sized network

Getting nominated still comes first. A submission to 929theticket.com that names the athlete, school, event, and a specific result, a hand-timed split, a final score, a set count, gives the sports desk something concrete to work with before that week's post goes live. Vague submissions lose out fastest in a crowded field, and get overlooked entirely in a quiet one, because there's less for an editor to weigh against.

Once voting opens, the daily cap makes reach, not repetition, the thing that reliably moves a total. In a County-sized network, that reach is short. A school's entire realistic voter pool (team families, alumni scattered from Presque Isle and Caribou down to Bangor or Portland for work) can be reached through one text chain and one Facebook post, and getting the direct poll link, the actual post, not the 929theticket.com homepage, in front of that group on day one does more than any single push on Thursday. A Wednesday reminder catches people whose Monday vote reset a day earlier and may have already forgotten.

For the underlying mechanics of running a fan-vote window beyond this one poll, the online contest voting guide covers the fundamentals that apply across platforms. When a County-sized organic network has been fully activated and a larger downstate program is still pulling ahead, some families look to vote-support services built for capped sports fan polls; the workable model there is paced delivery that matches the daily cap, not a burst of activity that stands out against a normal week's pattern. None of that overlaps with the state's other big annual reader votes: Best of the 207 and Down East's Best of Maine both run on a yearly business-category cycle, not a weekly sports one, so a spring track campaign and a restaurant or shop chasing a Best of the 207 or Best of Maine title are playing entirely different games on entirely different clocks.