Charlevoix Courier Gaylord Herald Times Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gaylord Herald Times Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

Published for readers of the Gaylord Herald Times, a northern Michigan title under the Charlevoix Courier newspaper group, this program lets fans pick a weekly high school sports honoree. The organizer is the Charlevoix Courier, whose online home is petoskeynews.com, and the balloting runs on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm service hosts each weekly ballot. One poll in the series is currently reachable at https://poll.fm/17102442, and every week of the season brings a fresh poll under the same series name.

The program sits squarely in the sport vertical and works as a public vote: the publisher's sports coverage nominates the athletes, and readers decide the winner on the poll. Schools in the nomination rotation are Gaylord, St. Mary and Johannesburg-Lewiston, the three communities whose games the Gaylord Herald Times covers. Recent ballots have drawn nominees from Gaylord softball, Gaylord girls soccer, Gaylord golf and St. Mary golf, so the series spans girls and boys sports across the fall, winter and spring seasons rather than a single sport.

Facts at a glance

Because the publisher, the platform and the coverage area are all fixed, the thing that changes from week to week is only the nominee list and the tally. Everything structural about the series, from the host to the schools in the rotation, stays the same across the season.

The dated record: editions, the weekly window and what is not published

The series is annual, and its confirmed years run 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and, most recently, 2026. That five-year run makes it one of the longer-lived high school athlete of the week programs in northern Michigan, and a 2027 edition is the next cycle expected. Within each edition the program does not run as a single contest but as a weekly sequence: polls run from September through May, tracking the Michigan high school sports calendar from fall season through spring.

The weekly rhythm is stated by the publisher in its own coverage: polls start on Monday mornings and end on Friday mornings. That gives every ballot a four-day life, from the start of the school week to the end of it, and a new set of nominees arrives the following Monday. The nomination side runs continuously too, since each week athletes from Gaylord, St. Mary and Johannesburg-Lewiston are nominated for their performances in that week's games.

The ballot the publisher prints carries no category roster, no wording on repeat-vote frequency and no eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters less here than it would on an annual awards ballot, because the structure is already fixed by the weekly format: one poll, one week, one winner, and the nominee list doing the work that a category list would do elsewhere.

Exact calendar dates for any individual week's poll are likewise not fixed in advance in anything the publisher has printed generically, since each ballot is dated by its own Monday opening. A supporter planning around a specific athlete's big game should read the live poll that week rather than working from the season pattern alone.

How a supporter votes in the Gaylord Herald Times Athlete of the Week today

The act of voting takes under a minute. A supporter pulls up the week's poll.fm ballot, scans the nominee list, taps one athlete and submits. The standings appear on the same page afterwards, visible to anyone who visits before the Friday morning close. There is no separate nomination step for voters and no second round; the weekly poll is the whole contest.

The ballot itself is a single-choice poll. Recent editions have listed nominees by name, school and sport, for example entries from Gaylord softball, Gaylord girls soccer, Gaylord golf and St. Mary golf on one ballot. Because the nominee pool rotates across three schools and many sports, the choice a supporter faces changes completely from one Monday to the next, which is why the series sustains reader interest across the whole September to May run.

Timing is the one constraint worth planning around. A poll opens Monday morning and closes Friday morning, so support built late in the week has less time to gather than support started Monday afternoon. A family, team or student section that wants to rally behind a nominee does best to treat Monday and Tuesday as its window, not Thursday night.

Nothing on the ballot indicates an account requirement, a login or a fee, and the publisher's coverage describes the poll as an open reader vote. If any of that ever changes, the change would show up on the live poll page itself, which is the one place the mechanics of the current week are stated.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan runs a crowded schedule of high school fan votes, and this series is the small-town end of it. Statewide and metro programs such as the Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the MLive Bay City-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week draw on large metro pools of schools and, in several cases, narrow to a single sport.

The Gaylord Herald Times series differs on three counts. First, its nomination pool is three schools, Gaylord, St. Mary and Johannesburg-Lewiston, which keeps each week's ballot short and the tallies tight. Second, it spans all sports across the school year rather than concentrating on football in the fall. Third, it is run by a local newspaper group, the Charlevoix Courier, whose coverage of those three communities is the source of the nominees, rather than by a statewide outlet.

Other Michigan programs a reader of this page may also encounter include the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week, the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week. Each of those ballots answers to a separate publisher under separate rules, so a vote cast on one has no bearing on another.

For a nominee in the Gaylord area, that separation is the practical point: winning the Gaylord Herald Times poll is a local readership honour, distinct from any statewide or metro ballot, and the two audiences rarely overlap in a single week.

Building support inside a four-day weekly window

The mechanic shapes the strategy. Because each poll lives only from Monday morning to Friday morning, and a fresh ballot with fresh nominees follows, support has to be organized fast and aimed at one specific week. The natural base is the school community itself: teammates, families, the student section and the local followers of Gaylord, St. Mary and Johannesburg-Lewiston sports can all be reached in the same few days, and a nominee whose week starts Monday evening has a real advantage over one whose supporters wait until Thursday.

The publisher has not stated its position on outside help anywhere on the ballot, so the cautious approach is the only defensible one: the newspaper counts the votes that arrive on its poll and has published no separate channel. Any organized push should stay within what a newspaper reader poll plainly allows, which is people choosing to open the page and vote. Our guide to getting more votes online covers outreach suited to a window this short, and readers weighing paid support can review the choices on our award votes page before deciding.