Northern Maine Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Bangor runs two separate athlete polls at once, and Aroostook County sits inside three

Bangor is a small city carrying two separate weekly sports polls that outsiders often assume are the same program. 92.9 The Ticket, a Townsquare Media radio station based in Bangor, runs a statewide Athlete of the Week vote pulling nominees from every MPA classification across Maine. The Bangor Daily News runs something else entirely: a Northern Maine edition scoped to three counties, Penobscot, Hancock, and Aroostook, with no connection to the radio station's ballot beyond sharing a home city.

That distinction matters most in Aroostook County, which sits inside three concurrent polls without any coordination between them. Big Country 96.9 in Presque Isle runs a county-only ballot sponsored by Northern Maine Community College. The statewide 92.9 Ticket poll pulls Aroostook schools into a field against every other Maine county. And the Bangor Daily News edition covered on this page draws the same county in as one-third of its footprint. A Presque Isle or Caribou athlete could, in principle, turn up on all three ballots in the same week. Three newsrooms. Three winner lists. Zero shared nominee pool.

None of the three programs defers to another. A family that assumes winning the county-only Aroostook County Athlete of the Week automatically counts toward the Bangor Daily News edition, or the reverse, is working from a false assumption. Each newsroom runs its own selection and its own vote count, and none of the three has published anything suggesting they compare notes.

When the Bangor Daily News edition is the one that actually matters

The BDN ballot isn't a smaller version of the statewide poll. It's a regional newspaper's own editorial call about who deserves recognition in its own coverage area, and that's a different kind of institution than a Townsquare radio brand running an engagement feature. For a family in Old Town, Brewer, or Ellsworth, the distinction isn't academic — a submission has to reach the Bangor Daily News sports desk specifically, not 929theticket.com, and a win carries the newspaper's own byline and archive rather than a radio station's on-air mention.

The three-county scope changes who a nominee actually competes against, too. On the statewide 92.9 Ticket ballot, a Bangor-area athlete competes against submissions from Portland, Lewiston, and every county between them, a field covering the same statewide range as Maine High School Athlete of the Week, Fall Season. On the BDN ballot, the field narrows to three counties only. A nominee from Ellsworth is up against Bangor and Presque Isle, not Scarborough or Thornton Academy. That narrower field is the entire reason a family whose athlete plays for a program that would never crack a statewide ballot's mentions might still have a realistic path to a win here.

It also means the BDN edition is the more forgiving entry point for a program with a small, tight community rather than a large alumni base. Numbers matter less when the competing field is three counties deep instead of sixteen.

What's actually confirmed here, and where the public record goes quiet

Here is the honest limit of what's confirmed: Bangor Daily News's Northern Maine Athlete of the Week has documented activity through 2023. Nothing available for this guide independently confirms whether the 2025-26 cycle runs on the same schedule, with the same three-county scope, under the same newsroom. That's not a reason to assume the program lapsed — regional newspaper polls often continue quietly, season after season, without fresh coverage restating their own rules. But it is a reason to check the current Bangor Daily News sports section before building a campaign around 2023 assumptions.

What has stayed consistent since the earliest documented cycles: the ballot draws from Penobscot, Hancock, and Aroostook county schools, spans every MPA sports season rather than locking to one, and closes on a Thursday evening cadence. No searchable archive of past winners is confirmed to exist on the BDN site the way some competing polls maintain one. Individual winners live inside whatever dated posts the sports desk published that week, not a consolidated results page.

No specific vote totals, no per-device cap, and no fixed announcement day are confirmed anywhere in the record available here. Where a fact isn't confirmed, the honest move is naming the gap, not borrowing a number from a different Maine poll's rules and presenting it as this one's own.

How the Thursday-evening close actually works, and why the exact hour matters

Thursday evening is the one deadline confirmed across BDN's coverage of this program, and it sets the poll apart from its closest neighbors. The statewide 92.9 Ticket ballot closes later the same day, at midnight Thursday. Big Country 96.9's Aroostook County ballot doesn't publish a fixed close time at all, just "weekly." Treating the BDN deadline as if it stretches to midnight, the way the radio station's cutoff does, risks missing the actual window by several hours.

Beyond the Thursday close, the public record doesn't say whether BDN reruns the format every single week of a season or skips weeks during school vacations. The Portland Press Herald's Southern Maine ballot, a comparable regional newspaper program, has gone quiet for stretches around holiday breaks in the past. Nothing confirms whether the Northern edition follows the same pattern. Treating a missing week as proof the program ended would be jumping ahead of what's actually known.

Running a campaign across three counties that don't share a city of real size

Penobscot, Hancock, and Aroostook together cover more land than New Jersey, and almost none of it is dense. Bangor is the only city in the footprint with a population past 30,000. Ellsworth, the Hancock County seat, has well under 10,000 residents. Presque Isle, Aroostook's commercial hub, is smaller still. A campaign built on the assumption that one big population center will simply show up doesn't really apply on this ballot the way it might closer to Portland.

What replaces population density is distance and how tightly word travels inside a single school. A Fort Kent or Madawaska nominee, up near the Canadian border, draws on a small, closely connected St. John Valley network that can reach a large share of a town within a day of a post going up, the same dynamic that plays out separately on the county-only Aroostook ballot run by Big Country 96.9. A Bangor or Brewer nominee pulls from a bigger raw population, but a more fragmented one, split across more schools competing for the same attention.

Getting the actual poll post in front of people, not the athlete's name mentioned secondhand, matters more here than in most of the state, given how much of this footprint depends on a message reaching a household directly rather than through one big shared local media market. A booster group, a church bulletin, a school's own social account: each one covers ground that a single general share to a Bangor-area page does not. The online contest voting guide covers the underlying mechanics of running a fan-vote week like this one, and where organic reach has been exhausted before Thursday evening, vote-support options built for sports fan polls exist, with the same caveat that applies throughout this guide: read whatever the current bangordailynews.com post says before assuming a rule from a different Maine poll carries over here.

Maine runs its business-side reader polls on an entirely separate track from any of this prep-sports coverage. Best of the 207 and Best of Maine both draw from business and lifestyle categories rather than school sports, worth knowing if a family is juggling a nomination here alongside a local business up for its own reader vote. The full set of Maine's fan-vote programs sits at the Maine contest hub, part of the nationwide contest directory covering similar programs in every state.