Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters get wrong about this poll

They look for it on Sunday night — and it is still open.

If you follow Massachusetts high school sports on SI, you probably know the football Player of the Week closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. This poll does not. The multi-sport Athlete of the Week closes Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That is not a minor distinction in a fan vote settled entirely by turnout. It means the decisive hours here run Monday — after most people have already assumed the week's polls are done and moved on. The supporters who know that close Monday morning with a real advantage over every supporter who stopped Sunday night.

The second thing that catches voters: the ballot is not on a standalone page. It lives inside a dated article on si.com/high-school/massachusetts/athlete-of-the-week. Old weeks' polls stay online with their embeds, so navigating to the hub and finding the most recently dated article matters. The poll you want is the current one, not a still-live embed from two weeks prior. The general fan-vote how-to guide walks through the weekly cadence if you are newer to this type of poll.

What the April 2025 field actually looked like

The week of March 31–April 6, 2025 is the one fully confirmed ballot on record for this poll. Ten nominees, three sports, ten schools spread across the state:

Five softball nominees, two each in baseball and lacrosse, and a field that runs from Taunton and Marshfield on the South Shore to Danvers (St. Johns Prep) on the North Shore to Sandwich at the Cape. No public, no Catholic, no independent school has any structural advantage in the voting — Bishop Stang and Belmont Hill land on the same ballot as Mansfield and Marshfield, and the voting mechanic treats them identically.

What that field also shows: sport-community overlap is almost zero. The parents who drove to Mansfield's April opener and the Sandwich lacrosse boosters are not the same people. Each nominee's campaign is self-contained. That is unusually important for strategy — winning here is about mobilizing one sport's community, not competing for the same pool of fans that a rival nominee also has access to.

Running a cross-sport campaign before Monday night

The AOTW's cross-sport structure means the voter pool for any given nominee is almost entirely separate from every other nominee's voter pool. A softball community and a lacrosse community share little. So the campaign question is not "how do we get more votes than the baseball nominee" — it is "how do we reach our sport's own community before the Monday close."

The Monday deadline gives an extra day that football's Sunday poll does not. But that day is only useful if your campaign is still moving. A push that runs hard on Saturday and Sunday and then stops has wasted it. The groups that win here — based on what the April 2025 field shows about the geography and institution mix — are the ones who treat Sunday as round one and Monday as the real contest.

And the reach is genuinely statewide. Sandwich at the Cape, Mansfield in Bristol County, Central Catholic in Lawrence — these are communities an hour or more apart. SI's Massachusetts AOTW is not a regional poll; it is pulling from the whole state with one ballot. That means a program in western Massachusetts competes on the same list as a program from the Merrimack Valley, and a school's actual community size matters less than how well it reaches the people it has. For context on other Massachusetts student-athlete recognition, see /usa/massachusetts/ or browse the national contest directory at /usa/.

Because the ballot is open, unlimited, and decided entirely by turnout before Monday night, structured vote-support campaigns are used for exactly this kind of weekly open poll.