MLive Flint-Area Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the MLive Flint-Area Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

The MLive Flint-Area Athlete of the Week is MLive's weekly reader poll recognizing high school athletes throughout the Flint area of Michigan. The organizer, MLive, is the news publisher behind several regional athlete ballots across the state, and the voting itself takes place on Crowdsignal, the poll.fm service. The vertical is sport, and the format is a public vote: the publisher lists the nominees, readers choose one and submit, and the tally is displayed on the ballot page.

The program differs from its football-only sibling in scope. Where MLive also runs a dedicated weekly football ballot for this same market, the athlete of the week series mixes codes, putting football nominees beside girls golf, boys soccer and other sports as the school calendar moves through the year.

Program facts at a glance

Since every nominee is a student still in school, this page describes the series by publisher, sport and community and does not name any individual athlete. The schools and towns named on a given ballot, from Owosso and Burton to Linden, Grand Blanc, New Lothrop, Dryden and Ortonville, are carried on the ballot itself.

The dated record for this ballot series

Three edition years are confirmed for the MLive Flint-Area Athlete of the Week: 2023, 2025 and 2026. The 2025 and 2026 runs each lasted as a weekly series of Crowdsignal ballots, and across those seasons the ballots ran from January into August, tracking the stretch of the school year when MLive's Flint-area coverage is heaviest. The gap between 2023 and 2025 means the series has not run in every calendar year since it first appeared.

The ballot at the link above currently carries a Poll Closed notice, so the latest completed round has ended. On that closed round, the girls golf entry from Owosso led with 31% of the tally, the football entry from Burton Bentley held 25%, and the boys soccer entry, also from Owosso, sat at 10%, with a Corunna nominee further down the list.

What MLive does not publish for this series is the exact opening and closing date of each weekly ballot, the full roster of sports that will appear in a given round, or any printed rule on how frequently one person may submit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher also has not announced whether the series returns in 2027, and no round dates for the platform beyond the monthly January to August span are posted anywhere on the ballot page.

How a supporter votes in the current round

Voting is a single action on a single page. MLive publishes each weekly ballot on Crowdsignal, the poll.fm service, and the ballot lists the week's nominees with a school and community label beside each option. A supporter reads the list, picks the circle next to the chosen athlete and presses Vote. The page then shows the running tally for the round, so the results are visible on the same page the vote was cast on.

When the poll is closed, the same page displays the final standing rather than the voting form, which is how the current ballot at poll.fm/17421122 reads. There is no separate results page to find, and no account is needed to see either the form or the tally. The next weekly ballot replaces this one at MLive's own pace, and the publisher has not posted a date for that handover.

Because each round is fresh, support earned in a closed week does not carry into the next. A nominee who appears again the following week starts from zero on the new ballot, which is why the weekly rhythm between January and August matters more than any single round. Checking MLive's Flint-area sports coverage, or the same poll.fm series page, is the practical way to catch a new round when it opens.

How this ballot sits beside MLive's other Michigan fan votes

The Flint-area athlete of the week is one of several sibling ballots on this site, all in the sport vertical and all in Michigan. The closest is the football player ballot MLive runs for this same city, which covers the same community but narrows to one sport, while this series spans the full athletic calendar. The two can run in overlapping weeks with different nominee lists.

MLive's format extends to other markets it covers. The Bay City-area football ballot, the Jackson-area football ballot and the Kalamazoo-area football ballot each follow the same weekly, football-only pattern in their own towns.

Two further siblings widen the frame beyond one publisher. The Ann Arbor-area football ballot serves the Ann Arbor market, and the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week takes a statewide view rather than a single metro. For a Flint-area supporter, the practical difference is eligibility: an athlete nominated here belongs to this ballot alone, and support given to another market's page does not count toward it.

Building support within this ballot's rules

The mechanic here rewards reach within a short window. Because each weekly round stands alone and closes when MLive marks it Poll Closed, the useful move is to concentrate a school's or a community's effort in the days a ballot is actually open, using the teams, families and local followers the nominee already has. There is no published nomination form for supporters to fill, so influence runs entirely through the Crowdsignal vote itself.

On outside help, MLive has published no policy text for this series, which means no one can quote the publisher's tolerance for vote services either way. The cautious position is the one that page's own format implies: a poll naming high school students invites ordinary community participation, and any shortcut should be judged against the fairness expectation that comes with that. The options and their trade-offs are described plainly on the award-votes reference page, without promises about results.