Vote for Bronson Battle Creek/Battle Creek Enquirer Athlete of the Week Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What separates the Enquirer's all-sports weekly ballot from Michigan's football polls

Most of the high school vote programmes in Michigan that sit beside this one are football polls. The MLive operations in Bay City, Flint, Kalamazoo, Jackson and Ann Arbor each run a player of the week ballot scoped to one sport and one season. The Battle Creek Enquirer takes a different shape: its Athlete of the Week, presented by Bronson Battle Creek Hospital, covers all high school sports, and in 2026 the paper stated it would run a boys award and a girls award in parallel. A baseball player in May and a track athlete in the same week compete on the same ballot, which almost never happens on the football-only siblings.

The programme belongs to the Battle Creek Enquirer, the daily newspaper serving Battle Creek, Michigan, and its weekly ballots are published through Crowdsignal at poll.fm. The current ballot, titled Vote for Bronson Battle Creek/Battle Creek Enquirer Athlete of the Week - Week of May 25-30, sits at poll.fm/17068076. The hospital sponsorship in the programme name is unusual among the Michigan siblings as well, where the polls carry the publisher's brand alone.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: weekly rhythm inside two confirmed seasons

Confirmed seasons for the programme span 2025 and 2026, drawn from the weekly ballots the Enquirer has posted across those years. The recurrence is weekly rather than annual in the ordinary sense: the paper's own description says that each week during the high school sports season it asks readers to vote for the top performance of the week, taking in events from Monday through Saturday. The 2025 and 2026 edition years are the product of that weekly rhythm running across two school years, and the pattern points toward a 2027 continuation.

The live ballot on file is the week of May 25-30, which places that cycle in May. That ballot spans spring sports: baseball, softball and boys track nominations from area schools. Because the programme rotates weekly, the May 25-30 ballot is one instance of a rolling series, and the Enquirer replaces it with a new poll.fm ballot as each week closes.

What the paper has not printed is the fine print around the window. The Enquirer has not published exact open and close times for the weekly vote, a category roster beyond the sports appearing on each ballot, or any per-supporter limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same holds for nomination timing, since the page on file shows only the voting stage and no separate nomination round.

How a supporter votes on the current poll.fm ballot

Voting here takes no more than a minute. A supporter opens the live ballot at poll.fm/17068076, reads the week's nominated performances, selects one, and submits. The May 25-30 ballot lists its nominees by name, school and sport, covering baseball, softball and boys track. Since every nominee is a student athlete, their names are not reproduced here; the poll page itself carries them.

Three practical points follow from the weekly format. First, the window is short: the Enquirer scopes each ballot to events from Monday through Saturday, so a supporter who waits past the weekend is voting on a closed round. Second, the ballot address moves: each week brings a new poll.fm poll, and poll.fm/17068076 is the current round rather than a permanent home, so the surest route is through the Enquirer's high school sports coverage at battlecreekenquirer.com. Third, the rules are thin on the page: the Enquirer has not printed any account requirement, so whether a login or an email is needed is not stated, and the submit control on the ballot is the only step the page itself documents.

Nothing on the ballot indicates a paid or tiered voting path. The Crowdsignal format presents a single list of nominees and one submit action, which is the whole mechanic a supporter performs in the week of May 25-30 or any other week.

Where this ballot sits among its Michigan neighbours

Six sibling programmes in Michigan share the public-vote, high-school-sports shape, and each differs from the Battle Creek ballot in publisher or scope. The Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the MLive Bay City-Area, Flint-Area, Jackson-Area and MLive Kalamazoo-Area football polls are all single-sport, seasonal ballots, four of them under the MLive banner. The High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week is the closest in breadth, since it covers the whole state rather than one market.

The Battle Creek Enquirer's version is the local-newspaper take: one city's paper, a hospital sponsor in the programme name, and a slate that follows whatever sports are in season in the Battle Creek area, from baseball and softball in that May week to whatever the fall and winter seasons bring. That breadth is the practical difference for a supporter. In a football-only sibling, a volleyball or soccer standout has no ballot to appear on; here, any sport the Enquirer covers in a given Monday through Saturday window can produce a nominee, and the boys and girls awards run separately in 2026.

Strengthening support in a weekly Enquirer ballot

A weekly ballot rewards speed more than any months-long contest does. The Enquirer scopes each round to Monday through Saturday events, so the entire life of a nomination is a few days, and a push that starts on Sunday has already lost most of its window. The useful moves are the ones a school community can execute fast: the coach or athletic department circulates the poll.fm address the day the ballot posts, families pass it through team group chats, and the school's own social accounts point at the exact weekly ballot rather than the paper's homepage.

On outside help, the position is simply unstated: the Enquirer has not published rules text about voting software, bots or purchased votes on the ballot page, so nobody can quote a policy that either permits or bans it. What is certain is the structure, a plain reader poll on Crowdsignal where every selection is a reader's click. Organizing genuine supporters early in the week is the approach that fits the format, and the broader methods for earning votes work best here when they are compressed into that short window.