Delmarva Now Fan's Choice Athlete of the Season: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing a first-time voter here gets wrong

Two different Delmarva Now polls live at the same URL. Miss that, and a supporter can spend a whole week voting in the wrong one. The outlet's weekly Athlete of the Week poll opens Monday and shuts Wednesday afternoon, crowning someone new every few days through the season. Fan's Choice Athlete of the Season is the other program: one vote per season, fall and spring, run off the same delmarvanow.com/sports/high-school/ page by the same sports desk.

Confirmed scale tells the real story here. The December 2025 fall cycle pulled more than 15,000 votes. That's an aggregate number for the whole edition, not a per-school or per-nominee count, and Delmarva Now hasn't published a breakdown of how that total split across finalists. Naming that gap matters more than pretending it isn't there: nobody outside the newsroom can currently point to how close last December's field actually was.

What that combination means practically: a season-long vote with a five-figure turnout and no published per-nominee split rewards sustained visibility across months, not a single well-timed push. The broader mechanics of pacing a real-turnout campaign against a season-length window, rather than a weekly one, are covered in the online vote-buying guide.

A tri-state ballot built around the peninsula, not the state line

Delmarva Now's coverage runs the whole peninsula: Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset counties on Maryland's Eastern Shore, sitting alongside Delaware's Sussex County reach and Virginia's own Eastern Shore counties. A Bayside Conference nominee from Maryland and a Virginia Eastern Shore nominee can land on the same Fan's Choice ballot, something a single-state poll never produces. That's a structural fact, not a marketing line, it's a direct result of Salisbury Daily Times' historic reader footprint.

Compare that against Maryland's statewide SI.com Athlete of the Week, which draws only from Maryland's MPSSAA and MIAA schools and closes every Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. Fan's Choice runs on Gannett's own regional infrastructure, closes on the season's calendar rather than a weekly clock, and never crosses paths with SI's national polling network at all. Two entirely different organizers covering overlapping Maryland ground, with different rules for each.

It's also worth separating from Delmarva Now's own weekly poll, which the outlet nominally files under its Delaware coverage even though it draws Eastern Shore Maryland nominees too. Fan's Choice is the season-ending counterpart to that weekly program, same sports desk, same URL, same publisher, entirely different vote.

What a five-figure vote total actually says about campaign scale

Fifteen thousand votes over one seasonal window is not a small number for a regional sports desk poll. It suggests boosters, alumni networks, and school communities across Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset counties, plus the Delaware and Virginia stretches of the readership, all turning out over the course of the voting period rather than in one concentrated burst.

No published cap means the season-long window itself is the only real constraint, not a vote ceiling. That reshapes strategy: a campaign here plays out over weeks or months, not the two-and-a-half-day sprint that defines the outlet's own weekly poll. Once a nominee's organic Bayside, county, and family networks have been reached across that longer window, some supporters extend their turnout with sports fan-poll vote support or the wider fan poll vote services built for open, uncapped, human-turnout votes like this one.

The full Maryland slate of tracked fan-vote and readers'-choice programs sits at the Maryland contest hub, part of the complete USA contest directory.