Who is the Herald News Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Herald News Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

The Herald-News runs Who is the Herald News Athlete of the Week, a weekly high school sport ballot that asks its Massachusetts readership to pick one standout from the week's coverage. The publisher is a daily newspaper serving the communities around its high school sports desk, and the program is one of several ways that desk turns its roundup reporting into reader participation.

Crowdsignal, the poll.fm platform, carries the vote itself at poll.fm/16676228. Each weekly installment lives on its own poll page, and the link above is the latest ballot in the series. When a window closes, the page is marked closed and the next week's poll takes its place.

The ballot's audience is specific: supporters of the schools the paper covers and the student-athletes on their rosters. Since every nominee is a minor competing in school sport, the program is described here by publisher, season and school rather than by naming individual nominees. The paper's own weekly story carries the current list.

Two things make this program different from a one-off community contest. First, it recurs weekly inside an annual cycle, so a supporter can plan around it across a whole season. Second, the host platform is a plain poll rather than a full contest suite, which keeps the supporter's action simple: open the page, read the names, click once.

The dated history of the ballot and what the paper does not publish

Confirmed edition years for the program are 2022, 2024 and 2025, and the paper runs it annually, with weekly ballots inside each season. That three-year spread comes from the ballot series itself, and it marks the Athlete of the Week vote as an established part of the paper's sports coverage rather than a one-season experiment.

Dated windows fix the rhythm. A winter ballot ran Feb. 16-21 and now shows closed on poll.fm. In the fall cycle, the paper framed its poll around performances of roundup sports, soccer, field hockey, golf and cross country, reported from the week of Sept. 7-12, and stated that voting would conclude Sept. 20 with the winner announced on heraldnews.com and on X. Those two windows, one from each season, show how the ballot follows the school sports calendar.

Several things stay off the organizer's published pages. There is no standing list of what each week's categories will be, no cap on repeat support, and no eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That gap is not unusual for a newspaper poll, but it changes how a supporter should work. Instead of assuming a rule carried over from a previous week, read the story and the ballot when the new poll posts. The paper's instructions travel with each week's edition, and the winner announcement after the close is the paper's own statement of how the window resolved.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Voting takes almost no effort. Open the current poll page on Crowdsignal, either directly at poll.fm or through the athlete of the week story on heraldnews.com, read that week's nominee list, click the selection beside one athlete, and submit with the control under the list. The poll then displays the running result, so a supporter can see the state of the race at the moment of voting.

Because each week is a separate poll, supporting an athlete across a season means returning week after week to a fresh ballot. The paper publishes the new link in its high school sports coverage each cycle, and the previous poll closes behind it.

The schools whose supporters fill the ballot come from the paper's coverage area: Atlantis Charter, Joseph Case, Diman, Durfee, Somerset Berkley and Westport. The paper's own invitation states that supporters of the schools and the student-athletes can visit heraldnews.com to vote, which makes the newspaper's site the intended front door to the poll even though the ballot itself lives on poll.fm.

Season shape matters for timing. Fall ballots lean on roundup sports such as soccer, field hockey, golf and cross country, while winter editions draw from indoor seasons. A supporter whose athlete competes in a fall sport should expect the window to open early in the week after performances are reported, and should treat the paper's story each week as the schedule for that ballot.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts neighbours

Massachusetts has an unusually dense set of publisher-run athlete ballots, and The Herald-News's program is one voice in a crowded market. The nearest structural sibling is the Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week, another daily newspaper's weekly high school vote in the same state, run by a different publisher for a different coverage area.

The Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week follows the same weekly-newspaper pattern, which means a supporter in eastern Massachusetts may legitimately hold more than one of these ballots open in the same week. Each answers to its own publisher's coverage area.

Statewide programs sit differently. The Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year is a seasonal award rather than a weekly poll, and the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week spans the whole state rather than one newspaper's circulation. The Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week narrow by sport.

What distinguishes the Herald-News ballot from that lineup is its tight coupling to one paper's roundup reporting: the nominees each week come from the performances that story covered, and the winner is announced through the same paper's channels.

Strengthening support in a weekly high school poll

Because the ballot resets every week, momentum has to be rebuilt each cycle rather than banked. The action the organizer asks for is a single click on poll.fm, so the practical work is getting the link in front of the school community while the window is open: team group chats, family networks, and the paper's own story as the shareable source. The paper's stated invitation is that supporters of the schools visit heraldnews.com to vote.

The organizer takes no published stance on outside assistance for this ballot, so the honest position is that nothing beyond the public click instructions is available, and a supporter who wants a broader push should weigh that against the paper's control over its own feature. Options for widening reach on ballots like this are compared on our votes guide, and award ballots specifically are covered on our award votes page.