Maine High School Athlete of the Week — High School on SI: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why Maine has three separate 'Athlete of the Week' polls, and which one this is

Fifteen thousand votes. That is roughly what came in during one week of the High School on SI Athlete of the Week poll in February 2025, the largest single-week total confirmed anywhere in Maine's prep fan-vote system. The winner, an eighth grader playing up for Madawaska's boys basketball team, took 64% of that field. No other confirmed result on this site, in any Maine sport poll, comes close to that number.

That scale is possible because of how this poll is built. High School on SI, operated by SBLive Sports (part of Minute Media), does not run one combined Maine ballot the way a statewide newspaper might. It runs a single rotating ballot at si.com/high-school/maine: football's edition in the fall, boys and girls basketball each winter, other MPA sports as spring arrives, one sport live at a time, all under the same name and the same rules. "Maine High School Athlete of the Week" on si.com is really a banner over whichever sport's ballot happens to be open that week.

Two other Maine polls share almost the same name and confuse people constantly. 92.9 The Ticket's Maine Athlete of the Week, run by Townsquare Media in Bangor, caps voting at one per device per day and closes Thursday at midnight, a single combined-sport ballot, not a rotation. The Aroostook County Athlete of the Week, hosted by Big Country 96.9 out of Presque Isle, only nominates athletes from Aroostook County schools. All three run in the same state, sometimes in the same week, and none of them share a nominee pool.

Confusing these three costs campaigns real votes every season, a family sharing the wrong link gets zero credit toward the poll they actually meant to enter. For the general mechanics behind fan-vote polls before getting into what is specific here, the online contest voting guide is a reasonable starting point.

What's confirmed for each sport's edition of this SI ballot

Fall belongs to football. Maine High School Football Player of the Week, the sport-specific SI edition, has posted confirmed 2024 winners from Hampden Academy and Dirigo, with ballots running eight to eleven nominees drawn from across the MPA classifications. Once football wraps in November, the rotation shifts.

Winter carries two separate ballots at once, not one. Boys basketball and girls basketball each get their own weekly SI poll, both edited by the same SI Maine desk, both closing Sunday at 11:59 p.m. A playoff week can carry as few as eight nominees pulled straight from that round's tournament results, narrower than a regular-season ballot, which raises how much a single school's turnout is worth.

What stays fixed across every sport

The mechanic itself never changes. No account, no login, and votes are unlimited per device; SBLive's own rule allows repeat voting without a per-period reset while explicitly banning bots and automated scripts, and anyone caught running one is removed from that week's poll. Nominees come from SI's editorial judgment, not a public submission form the way 92.9 The Ticket runs one; a strong performance is more likely to get picked up if it is already visible somewhere public, a school's own social account, a local paper, a coach's post, before that week's ballot goes live.

Spring is the thinnest documented stretch. Track, baseball, softball, and the rest of the MPA spring calendar presumably rotate through the same si.com/high-school/maine hub on the same terms, though no specific spring nominee or winner is confirmed here the way the fall and winter editions are. That gap is worth naming rather than guessing past.

The Madawaska result: what a 15,000-vote week actually looks like

One data point does a lot of explaining here. In February 2025, an eighth-grade nominee representing Madawaska's boys basketball program won that week's SI ballot with 64% of a field that totaled roughly 15,000 votes. SI does not publish a running leaderboard, so this is a single confirmed result, not a season average; most weeks likely run far lower, and there is no public archive to check that against.

Two things make the number believable rather than freakish. First, the mechanic itself has no ceiling: unlimited votes per device means a small, motivated group can generate a multiple of its own size in a single sitting, something a capped poll like 92.9 The Ticket's structurally cannot allow. Second, Madawaska sits in the St. John Valley, part of Aroostook County's tightly connected, partly French-speaking Acadian community, the kind of network that answers a shared link fast and keeps answering it, not just once.

An eighth grader on a varsity ballot is also less unusual in far-northern Maine than it would be in a Class A South town like Scarborough. Small rural schools sometimes move younger players up when a roster is thin, and a call-up like that tends to become the kind of story a community rallies around, win or lose.

The mechanics: what si.com/high-school/maine actually confirms

The rules are short enough to state plainly. Votes are unlimited per device, no account or sign-up step exists anywhere in the process, and the window closes every Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Winners go up in the following week's post, not a same-night announcement, and not a percentage breakdown; SI names the winner and moves on to the next ballot.

One quirk trips people up: the ballot lives inside a dated article, not a standalone page that always shows the current poll. Bookmarking si.com/high-school/maine and checking the byline date on the newest post is the only reliable way to confirm you are voting on the current week rather than a closed one from three weeks back.

Nomination is editorial, not open submission. There is no public nomination email listed for this ballot the way 92.9 The Ticket publishes one for its own poll; a performance is more likely to reach SI's Maine desk if it is already visible somewhere a reporter would see it.

Running a campaign on an unlimited-vote, rotating ballot

Unlimited voting changes the math completely compared with a capped poll. One phone, checked back into that same post ten or twenty times across a weekend, is ten or twenty votes on its own, something a one-per-day platform never allows from a single device. A household of four doing that over a Saturday-to-Sunday stretch lands somewhere around sixty to eighty votes before a single friend or classmate gets asked to help.

That arithmetic is close to what produced the Madawaska week's 15,000-vote field: not one person voting fifteen thousand times, but a community that kept returning to the same link, hour after hour, through the Saturday-Sunday window before the 11:59 p.m. close. Getting the direct post URL, not just the si.com homepage, in front of a team group chat, a booster list, and a school's own social account as early in the week as possible is what gives a nominee time to build that kind of return-visit pattern.

There is a plain difference worth naming. Automated scripts that hammer the same request over and over get caught and pulled; SI is explicit that bots are prohibited and that violators are removed from the poll. Real people voting from their own devices, repeatedly, because a group chat keeps reminding them, produce the same pattern a genuinely enthusiastic town produces on its own. Fan-vote support services exist for campaigns that have run out of organic reach and want that kind of paced, real-voter push; whether it fits a given family's comfort level is worth weighing against the legal and terms-of-service basics of buying votes before starting.

Maine runs two statewide reader polls with nothing to do with sports at all, Best of the 207 and Down East's Best of Maine, plus the seasonal 92.9 Ticket fall edition covered elsewhere on this site. The full picture of what is active sits at the Maine contest hub; the national index of every state's fan-vote guides is at /usa/.