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

Why 'Athlete of the Week' quietly becomes a basketball poll once November hits

The ballot's name never changes, but what actually sits on it does. Once the MPA winter season opens in mid-November, the same 92.9 The Ticket poll that split football, cross country, soccer, volleyball, and golf votes across five sports all fall turns almost entirely into a basketball showcase. Class A North programs built around Bangor supply the winter's deepest fan base of any single sport in the state, and their basketball nominees carry the heaviest week-over-week traffic.

There's a second pattern worth knowing before a campaign starts. Maine names its own Mr. and Miss Basketball honorees each winter, a separate statewide recognition decided outside this fan-vote ballot, and the senior finalists for those honors show up as nominees here with real regularity. A player in contention for that statewide honor appearing on the 92.9 Ticket ballot in the same February week is not a coincidence. It's the same small pool of standout Class A North seniors that both the fan poll and the season-long award conversation are watching.

None of that means hockey, wrestling, swimming, or skiing nominees disappear from the ballot. They don't. But the volume gap between a Bangor-area basketball week and a smaller-turnout Nordic skiing week is real, and a family running a winter campaign should walk in knowing which kind of week they're actually competing in. For how fan-vote polls like this one work in general terms, the online contest voting guide covers the mechanics before the Maine-specific detail below.

What's actually on the winter ballot, and the archive that doesn't exist

The winter nominee pool draws from six MPA sports: boys and girls basketball, ice hockey, swimming and diving, wrestling, indoor track, and alpine and Nordic skiing. All of it runs on the cadence 92.9 The Ticket uses year-round — a new post most weeks, a Thursday-midnight close, a Friday name in print.

What doesn't exist is a place to check any of that after the fact. 92.9 The Ticket publishes a fresh winner in a dated Friday article, and that's where the record stops. Nothing rolls those results into a searchable list, and no season-end tally distinguishes a January basketball winner from a March skiing one.

That gap in the archive doesn't make the seasonal pattern a guess. Basketball's presence on the ballot runs heaviest from December's opening tip through the MPA tournament stretch in February and March, when Class A North's Bangor-area programs draw statewide attention no matter who's actually nominated that week.

Two winter basketball polls run in Maine at once, and this isn't the other one

Confusing this with Maine's other winter basketball poll is an easy mistake, and it costs campaigns real votes. High School on SI runs a separate Maine Boys Basketball Player of the Week through SBLive at si.com/high-school/maine — basketball only, unlimited votes per device, closing Sunday at 11:59 p.m. That's a materially different mechanic from the daily-capped, all-sport 92.9 Ticket ballot this page covers.

The overlap that actually matters: a Class A North basketball nominee can, in the same week, appear on both ballots — the statewide 92.9 Ticket poll that covers every winter sport and closes Thursday, and the SBLive basketball-only poll that runs through Sunday with no cap at all. They aren't the same campaign. A family running one should check the SBLive basketball poll's own rules rather than assume the same vote total or the same tactics carry over.

The practical difference for anyone actually voting: on the SBLive ballot, one motivated device can cast dozens of votes before Sunday because nothing resets it. On the 92.9 Ticket ballot, a single device tops out at one vote a day, so a Thursday-to-Thursday winter campaign here depends on how many separate people you reach, not how many times one phone can click.

Why Bangor-area basketball carries the winter ballot's biggest weeks

Bangor sits at the center of Maine's most organized winter-sports infrastructure, and it isn't close. The city's Cross Insurance Center hosts the MPA's regional and state basketball tournaments each February and March, which means Class A North programs built around Bangor High School play in front of the state's largest in-season basketball crowds before a single vote is ever cast.

Under a daily cap, that crowd matters less for raw numbers and more for how fast it turns into people actually returning to the poll Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. A Bangor-area program's booster network is built around decades of tournament culture and typically moves within hours of a nomination going up.

That doesn't lock out the state's smaller winter programs. Class B and C schools in the north, Hermon, Orono, and the Mount Desert Island area among them, carry tighter, faster-moving parent networks that can sustain four straight days of voting even when their raw fan base is a fraction of a Class A program's. The daily reset rewards that kind of consistency over sheer size, the same dynamic that shapes the fall football stretch on the exact same platform.

A skiing or wrestling nominee from a small Aroostook County program faces the identical arithmetic, just with an even smaller pool of realistic voters to work with. Aroostook's own county-only Athlete of the Week poll runs on a separate ballot entirely, worth checking if the athlete's home county has its own local option outside the statewide one.

Getting a winter nomination in, then running the four-day window

The nomination step decides who gets a shot before a single vote is cast. Submissions go through the form or by email at 929theticket.com, the same channel used year-round, and a submission naming the athlete, school, sport, and a specific stat line or result competes far better in a tournament-season basketball field than a vague "had a good week" entry does.

Once the ballot is live, the daily cap makes reach, not repetition, the only lever that consistently moves a winter total. One device voting Monday through Thursday adds four votes across the window; that number doesn't change whether the nominee plays basketball or Nordic skiing.

Campaigns that close a gap before Thursday midnight get the direct poll link, the specific post, not the 929theticket.com homepage, in front of the team group chat, the booster list, and the school's athletics social account as soon as voting opens, then send a Wednesday reminder to anyone whose Monday vote has already reset. The general tactics behind that kind of push are covered in the online contest voting guide; the terms-of-service side of paid vote support is addressed directly in this breakdown of buying votes for online contests.

When the organic network is tapped out and a Bangor-area basketball opponent's booster list is still ahead, some families turn to a paid outreach service built for capped fan polls. The distinction that matters is cap-matched, paced delivery from real voters, not a script that fires outside the daily rhythm and gets flagged. Maine runs two statewide reader polls outside of sports worth knowing about too: Best of the 207 and Down East's Best of Maine, both on an annual business-category cycle separate from this weekly athlete ballot.