Vote for the Old Colony Memorial Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Old Colony Memorial Athlete of the Week ballot is

Old Colony Memorial is a Massachusetts community newspaper, and its Athlete of the Week feature is a recurring reader vote rather than a judged award. Each week the paper assembles a short slate of local high school nominees and asks its readers to pick a winner. The vote runs on Crowdsignal, the service that operates poll.fm, and this week's ballot lives at poll.fm/16955673.

Nominees do not sign themselves up. The paper's sports desk asks coaches to send in nominations by email, each with a short description of what the athlete accomplished that week. The wording the paper uses is: "Coaches, please email me at [email protected] with nominations for Athlete of the Week along with a short description of their accomplishments." That makes the coach email route the official way onto a weekly slate, and it explains why the nominee list is short and curated rather than an open free-for-all.

The ballot itself is plain. Each nominee line pairs a class year, a school program and a sport, so a reader can tell a senior softball player from a freshman tennis player at a glance. After a vote is cast, Crowdsignal displays the running tally, which is how the paper's readers see the race develop over the life of each weekly ballot.

The weekly calendar and what the paper does not print

This is a weekly series inside an annual cycle, and the confirmed edition years are 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Within those seasons the ballots are dated across the months from September through June, which matches a school-year sports calendar: fall slates in September, October and November, then spring slates from April through June. A single weekly ballot is live for a short span, and the next slate replaces it once the vote closes.

What the paper has not published is the part a supporter most wants to plan around. Exact open and close dates for each weekly ballot appear nowhere on the ballot itself, and neither does any per-reader vote limit, daily return rule or eligibility wording. Because every slate runs on its own short schedule, the only dependable way to catch a live window is to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The same gap applies to the shape of the contest. The ballot publishes no category list beyond the single Athlete of the Week question, and it announces no round dates beyond the life of the current slate. A reader who needs a precise closing time for this week's vote, or a written rule on how many times a single reader may vote, will not find either printed on the Crowdsignal page the paper runs.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

The mechanic is plain, as fits a community newspaper poll. A supporter opens the week's ballot at the poll.fm address the paper publishes, reads the nominee slate, selects one athlete and presses the vote button. Crowdsignal then shows the tally, so the reader immediately sees where their nominee stands. No purchase, no entry fee and no nomination step stands between the reader and the vote.

Each nominee line carries three pieces of information: a class year, the school program the athlete competes for, and the sport. On recent slates that has meant girls softball, boys baseball and boys tennis nominees, from freshmen through seniors. The slate is short enough to read in seconds, which suits a weekly feature that lives or dies on quick reader participation.

Because a fresh ballot replaces the closed one week after week, supporting an athlete is a one-week commitment, not a months-long campaign. The practical consequence is that timing dominates: a vote cast early in a slate's life has the same weight as one cast near the close, but an early vote gives the nominee's supporters more days to build on it. A supporter who wants to follow the series through the school year simply returns to the paper's sports coverage or the series page each week and repeats the same three-step action on the new slate.

Where this ballot sits among Massachusetts sport votes

Massachusetts has no shortage of high school sport votes, and this one is the most local of them. It belongs to a single community newspaper, Old Colony Memorial, and its nominee slate is drawn from that paper's own coverage area. Neighbouring programmes answer to different publishers and wider geographies: the Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week are separate papers' features, while the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year reach across the whole state. Season-specific votes such as the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week narrow by sport instead of by town.

The scale difference shows in the numbers. One closed Old Colony Memorial ballot ended with the leading nominee at 53 percent on 56 votes, a total that a statewide ballot would dwarf. Small tallies are the norm for a single-community weekly poll, and they change the strategy: a handful of determined supporters can move a race here in a way they could not on a statewide feature.

For a nominee's family, coach or teammates, that makes this the most winnable kind of ballot in the state's sport-vote landscape, provided the push happens inside the one week the slate is live.

Strengthening support inside a one-week window

Everything about this ballot rewards speed. A slate is live for roughly a week, tallies are small, and the winner is whoever's community mobilises fastest. The highest-impact moves cost nothing: ask the coach to submit a strong nomination email early in the week, share the ballot link through the team's own parent and student channels on the first day rather than the last, and remind people that the slate changes the following week so there is no second chance for this nominee.

On outside help, the ballot prints no statement about voting software or automated voting, so the paper's position is not stated in the ballot text. What is visible is the mechanic: one selection per vote cast, on a poll whose totals run to a few dozen. Any support that arrives in a volume wildly out of step with those totals will be conspicuous to anyone watching the tally, whatever the paper's written position turns out to be. Readers weighing their options can start with our guide to earning more votes, which stays inside what the ballot's own rules allow.