Southern Maine Athletes of the Week — Fall Season: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one gap that separates this fall ballot from the 92.9 Ticket standard

No fixed close time. That's the first thing worth knowing before treating this ballot like its statewide cousin. The 92.9 The Ticket fall Athlete of the Week poll publishes a Thursday-midnight deadline and a one-vote-per-device-per-day cap, in writing, every week of the season. Portland Press Herald's Varsity Maine desk has never published either number for its own fall ballot. That gap isn't an oversight worth quietly papering over — it changes how a campaign here actually has to run.

Two polls, same months, same state, different rulebooks entirely. The 92.9 Ticket ballot draws nominees from every MPA classification statewide, Aroostook to York County. Press Herald's fall ballot stays inside three counties: Cumberland, York, and Androscoggin. A Thornton Academy football nominee could, in theory, show up on both ballots the same week, since Thornton sits inside both footprints. A nominee from Bangor or Presque Isle never appears on this one at all.

What that means in practice: the sustained-return math that works against a daily reset on the statewide poll doesn't map cleanly onto a ballot where Press Herald hasn't documented any reset window. Anyone planning a fall push here needs to read the live pressherald.com post directly rather than borrow assumptions from the better-documented 92.9 Ticket rules.

What's actually confirmed about the fall edition, and where the record goes quiet

Here's what the record shows. The fall window covers five sports: football, soccer, field hockey, cross country, and golf. Nominees come from schools inside Cumberland, York, and Androscoggin counties, published inside a new Varsity Maine post each week rather than parked on one standing page. The 2025-26 cycle is confirmed live.

Here's where it goes quiet. Press Herald hasn't posted a public nomination email or form for this program specifically, the way 92.9 The Ticket runs a documented submission address for its own fall poll. No per-device vote cap appears anywhere in the material available for this ballot. And there's no searchable archive of prior fall winners, so a parent asking who won Week 3 last October gets no answer from the site itself — only whatever a search engine happened to index from that week's dated post.

None of that makes the ballot less real. It makes it less documented, which is a different problem, and one worth naming honestly rather than covering over with a guessed cap number that might not survive contact with next week's live page.

How the fall ballot runs, side by side with the statewide standard

Football, soccer, field hockey, and golf all open together in late August; cross country runs the same stretch through the first weeks of November. Each week's post carries its own nominee field rather than a running tally that carries over from the previous week.

One sport-list quirk is worth flagging directly. Field hockey appears on the Southern Maine fall ballot and nowhere on the 92.9 Ticket list; volleyball runs the reverse. A field hockey family in Scarborough or Cheverus has exactly one regional fall ballot to work with, not two, and this is it.

Why football weeks carry the heaviest fall traffic across these three counties

Football drives the fall traffic here the same way it does on every other Maine ballot running this season, and the reason has nothing to do with the poll's design. Friday-night attendance and booster-list size decide who shows up ready to vote Saturday morning, not any weighting built into the mechanic itself.

Portland's three city schools — Deering, Portland High, and Cheverus — share overlapping alumni bases inside a few square miles, so a fall football nominee from any of the three lands in front of an audience already primed to pay attention. Move south into York County and the shape changes: Thornton Academy in Saco fields one of the state's larger programs, while Massabesic in Waterboro and Kennebunk draw from towns where a single booster email reaches a meaningful share of the roster's extended families in one send.

Cross country and golf run the same August-through-October window but rarely pull the volume football does. A strong cross country performance can make the ballot and still finish behind a football nominee on turnout alone, not merit. Field hockey sits in between: Scarborough and Bonny Eagle both field competitive programs with parent networks organized enough to move fast once a nomination goes up. Brunswick, folded into Press Herald's coverage through its Times Record sister paper, draws a smaller and more self-contained fan base than a Cumberland County program of similar size — worth knowing before assuming every fall nominee starts from equal footing. For how a much smaller county-only ballot handles this same football-volume problem, the Aroostook County Athlete of the Week page runs the comparison.

Running a fall push when the rulebook stays this thin

Press Herald hasn't published a standing nomination process for the fall program specifically. The most reliable move is checking the current week's Varsity Maine post directly on pressherald.com and following whatever submission line runs with that particular week, since prep-sports contact details shift between seasons and sometimes between writers.

Once a name is live, the campaign math is harder to plan around than it would be on a poll with a published cap. What moves the needle is the direct link itself landing in front of people, not a screenshot or just the athlete's name typed into a chat thread. Pairing a parent Facebook group, the program's own booster page, and a coach's team-wide email tends to cover more distinct households in a weekend than any single channel manages alone. The general cadence for running a week like this is covered at the how-to guide; the legal side of paid vote support gets a direct answer at is buying votes legal.

For fall campaigns that have exhausted organic reach and still need more, structured vote-support options for sports fan polls exist, though reading whatever terms currently sit on the live pressherald.com post first is the sensible move given how thin the public rulebook is. The broader online contest voting guide covers general mechanics that apply beyond this one ballot. Southern Maine also runs two separate business-category reader polls worth knowing about: Best of the 207 and Best of Maine, both on an entirely different annual cycle than this weekly fall sports ballot. The Maine contest hub ties every regional and statewide option together in one place.