Maine Girls XC Performer of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Maine Girls XC Performer of the Week is and who runs it

Maine Girls XC publishes the Performer of the Week as a fan-voted, weekly award recognizing girls cross country in Maine. The organizer is a state focused outlet for high school cross country coverage, and every round is carried on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), one of the most common polling platforms for weekly sports recognition ballots. The voting address is poll.fm/16238630, which during the season carries the round in progress and between rounds shows the most recent one.

The format is deliberately narrow. Unlike a readers-choice program that spans dozens of business categories, this ballot asks a single question each week: which runner was the standout performer of the past week. Each round's nominees are listed on the poll page with their school, their class and their race time from a recent meet, so a supporter can see exactly what each nominee did before voting. Recent confirmed rounds drew their fields from class championship meets across Maine's enrollment classes.

Because the series is built around weekly recognition rather than an annual finale, its audience is the cross country community itself: runners, teammates, families and fans who follow Maine's fall season. The table below gathers the essentials a supporter or a nominee's camp needs first.

The dated record: which seasons are confirmed and what the ballot does not say

Two seasons are confirmed for the series, 2024 and 2025, established from the ballots the organizer has published across those falls. That makes the program a recurring fixture on Maine's cross country schedule, not a one-season experiment, though the ballot page carries no statement about a 2026 season or how many weeks each fall's series spans.

The most precisely dated round is the 2025 ballot that ran from October 27 through November 2, which is now marked closed. Within any week the rhythm is consistent: nominees are posted on Monday, and voting remains open until Thursday at 8 p.m. That cadence comes from the organizer's own accompanying coverage, which states that each Monday during the season brings a new set of nominees with the window closing Thursday evening.

One part of the program is genuinely undocumented. Maine Girls XC has not published how it selects each week's nominees, whether coaches submit candidates or the editorial side picks them from meet results, so supporters wondering why a particular runner is or is not on the slate should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Other gaps are stated plainly on the ballot page. There is no printed eligibility rule for nominees beyond the weekly slate itself, no published total vote target, and no announcement of when the fall series' final round lands. For a series this short, those details matter less than they would in a month-long campaign, but anyone planning support around a specific week should read the current ballot before assuming anything about its shape.

How a supporter votes this week, step by step

Voting is a simple action, but the weekly rhythm is what supporters most often get wrong. The mechanic, as stated on the ballot and in the organizer's coverage, gives each person one vote per day, with the window open from the Monday posting until Thursday at 8 p.m. That means a supporter who wants to give a nominee maximum support within the rules votes once on each day the poll is live, not several times in a single sitting.

The practical sequence looks like this. Open poll.fm/16238630 early in the week to see the fresh nominee list, since the slate rotates every Monday and last week's runners will not be there. Read the times and meets listed beside each name, pick a performer, and submit. Then set a reminder to return Wednesday and again before the Thursday 8 p.m. close if you want your daily votes to count.

Two cautions follow from the format. First, the poll page is the latest round of a weekly series, so a link saved from a previous week may lead to a closed ballot rather than the live one; the fastest fix is to reach the current round through the organizer's weekly coverage post. Second, because each round is short, a vote cast after Thursday evening lands on a closed poll and does nothing for a nominee. Timing, more than volume, is the constraint a weekly ballot imposes.

How this weekly ballot sits beside Maine's other fan votes

Maine supporters already encounter several public-vote programs, and this one is unlike any of them in shape. The state's best-of programs, such as Best of the 207 and Best of Maine, run long annual cycles with many categories and business nominees. The Kennebec Journal Readers' Choice ballot follows the same newspaper-driven pattern. This performer poll does the opposite: one question, a handful of nominees, a window measured in days.

The same contrast holds against the other statewide ballots. The Maine Parade of Homes People's Choice, the Maine Restaurant Week Diners' Choice and the Mainebiz Readers' Choice all celebrate businesses or buildings, and all give supporters weeks to participate. The cross country poll celebrates an individual athlete's week of racing and compresses participation into a Monday-to-Thursday sprint.

That compression changes how support works. In a month-long readers-choice round a slow start can be recovered; in a weekly poll a nominee's camp has roughly three or four days of daily votes available per supporter before the result stands. Anyone involved in both kinds of programs should treat them as separate efforts with separate calendars, because a tactic tuned to an annual ballot does not transfer to one that closes every Thursday evening.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

A weekly ballot rewards early, organized sharing. The window closes Thursday at 8 p.m. and each supporter may vote once daily, so the strongest legitimate push is one that reaches the team's community on Monday or Tuesday and reminds daily voters to return through the week. A short message with the direct poll link, sent to teammates, families and school groups, does more in this format than any last-minute appeal on Thursday afternoon.

The organizer has not posted a policy on outside vote support for this series, so the binding constraints are the poll's own daily limit and the platform's ordinary protections. Anything that looks like inflated or irregular activity on a small weekly poll stands out more than it would on a large annual ballot, where volume is higher. To read more on how support works in short-window contests, our award votes overview and the general service page both cover the mechanics without promising outcomes.