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

What makes the Southern Maine ballot different from Maine's other prep polls?

Three organizations run competing athlete-of-the-week ballots in Maine, and that matters more here than in most states. 92.9 The Ticket covers the Bangor-and-north market. Bangor Daily News runs its own northern edition. Portland Press Herald, through its Varsity Maine sports desk, claims the Portland metro and the southern tier (Cumberland, York, and Androscoggin county schools) as its own lane. A Scarborough soccer player and a Bonny Eagle field hockey player compete against each other on the Press Herald ballot; they would never show up on the Bangor version at all.

That geographic split shapes turnout in a way a single statewide poll doesn't. Portland is Maine's densest media market, and Press Herald's subscriber base skews toward exactly the towns whose schools appear on this ballot week after week: Falmouth, Windham, Gorham, South Portland. A household that already reads the Press Herald sports section on Sunday morning is a household that already knows the ballot exists, which is not something you can assume for a poll buried on a statewide radio station's website. For readers weighing this program against Maine's other statewide fan-vote options, the Maine contest hub lays out how the three ballots relate.

What Press Herald has confirmed about this program, and where the record goes quiet

Here's the honest gap: Press Herald does not maintain a searchable archive of past Southern Maine Athletes of the Week results. What's confirmed is the structure: three separate seasonal ballots (fall, winter, spring), a mixed-gender field pulling from nine sports (cross country, football, soccer, field hockey, golf, basketball, baseball, softball, and track), and a live, running 2025-26 cycle. Individual week-by-week winners live only in the dated posts themselves, scattered across a season rather than collected on one page.

That's a different shape than the sibling Maine High School Athlete of the Week (Fall Season) ballot, which runs on a separate platform with its own cadence. Both cover Maine prep sports; neither shares nominees with the other, because the two organizers pull from different school lists and different weeks. Nobody should assume a name that wins one ballot ever appeared on the other. For the broader mechanics of how fan-vote polls like this one typically run, the online contest voting guide covers the general playbook before the Southern Maine specifics take over.

How the pressherald.com ballot runs across fall, winter, and spring

Three separate windows, not one continuous poll. Fall covers football, soccer, field hockey, cross country, and golf. Winter shifts to basketball. Spring brings baseball, softball, and track. Each window resets its own nominee pool weekly rather than carrying candidates over from the prior sport's season, so a fall soccer standout and a spring track standout never compete against one another for the same weekly recognition.

No per-device cap is published for this ballot the way it is on some SI-run polls elsewhere in the state. That absence isn't a loophole to exploit blindly; it's a gap in the public record. Anyone planning around it should read the current ballot page directly rather than assume the terms that apply to a different Maine poll carry over here.

The Portland-area rivalries that decide close weeks on this ballot

Portland's a small city with a big sports rivalry running straight through it. Deering and Portland High share a ZIP code and a century of football history; Cheverus sits a few blocks from both, pulling from a Catholic-school alumni network that stretches well beyond city limits. Put a nominee from any of the three on the same weekly ballot and you've got three overlapping fan bases reaching for the same phones.

Move ten miles out and the dynamic flips. Bonny Eagle, Windham, and Gorham are all SMAA schools drawing from towns that grew fast over the last two decades, bedroom communities where a booster club's group text can reach most of a graduating class's parents in one send. A Standish or Windham nominee competing against a Portland-proper name isn't a mismatch of raw population; it's a contest between a tight suburban network and a fractured urban one split three ways. Compare that to how a similarly-sized market handles its own weekly poll on the Aroostook County Athlete of the Week ballot, where the county's much lower population density changes the math entirely.

Brunswick sits at the edge of the coverage map, folded in through the Times Record's relationship with Press Herald rather than as a core Portland-metro town. A Brunswick nominee draws on a smaller, more self-contained fan base than a Scarborough or South Portland name would — worth knowing before assuming every school on this ballot starts from the same footing.

Getting a nominee onto next week's Southern Maine ballot

Press Herald has not published a public nomination email or form for this specific program the way some other Maine outlets have. The most reliable path is checking the current week's Varsity Maine post on pressherald.com directly and following whatever submission instructions run with that week's ballot, since editorial contact details for prep sports coverage can shift between seasons.

Once a name is on the ballot, the campaign work is mostly about reach, not repetition. Sharing the direct ballot link (not a screenshot, not just the athlete's name typed into a group chat) matters because Press Herald's site is where the actual vote gets recorded. A booster club splitting outreach across a team group chat, a school's alumni Facebook page, and a town recreation-league email list covers more distinct households than one person refreshing the same page repeatedly. For the general cadence of running a fan-vote week like this one, the how-to guide covers the underlying tactics; for polls where organic reach has plateaued and the field is tight, structured vote-support options exist, though reading the current pressherald.com terms first is the sensible move given how thin the public rulebook is here. The wider national fan-vote index and the Southern Maine business counterpart, Best of the 207, both show how this single sports ballot sits inside a much larger Maine contest landscape — including the business-side Best of Maine reader vote running on an entirely separate track.