Vote for the Cheboygan Daily Tribune's Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Cheboygan Athlete of the Week ballot exists

The Cheboygan Daily Tribune runs Vote for the Cheboygan Daily Tribune's Athlete of the Week as a standing invitation to its own community: readers in Cheboygan, Michigan, and the families, classmates and teammates around its high school sports beat decide together which local standout earns the weekly honor. The Tribune is the newspaper behind cheboygannews.com, and the ballot itself lives on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), the polling service that hosts many newsroom reader votes. Because the paper covers Cheboygan-area high school athletics week after week, the people voting are the same people whose ballfields and gymnasiums produce the nominees, which is what gives the result its local weight.

Each round is a single public poll rather than a multi-category form. The Tribune posts the slate, readers open the page and pick, and the week's winner carries the paper's Athlete of the Week title, with the sports desk listing each week's winner in its follow-up coverage. The table below gathers the details a supporter needs before voting.

The dated history of the Cheboygan Athlete of the Week series

Confirmed seasons of the Cheboygan series run 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and then 2026, drawn from 39 ballots published across those five seasons. That count makes this a weekly fixture rather than a yearly gala: the Tribune posts a fresh ballot each week while its sports calendar is active, and each season is simply the sum of those rounds. The ballot behind this page's voting link is titled for the May 26-30 week and carries a Poll Closed marker, so that round has finished. Earlier that same year, the Tribune's coverage of a February round noted that voting concluded on the night of Thursday, February 19, which shows the same weekly rhythm holding through the winter months.

Gaps on the ballot page matter just as much as what it prints. The Tribune has not printed the dates of upcoming rounds on the poll page itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No category roster accompanies the poll, since the ballot is a single list of that week's nominees rather than a multi-division form. How nominees reach the weekly slate is also not described in the Tribune's printed voting instructions, so supporters wondering who assembles the list will not find it spelled out alongside the poll.

How a supporter votes in the current Cheboygan ballot

Voting follows the mechanic the Tribune prints alongside the poll. A reader arrives at the poll.fm ballot, reads the week's nominee slate with each entry showing a school and a sport, selects the athlete to back, and submits the form. The Tribune's instructions are the part that matters most: voting is unlimited until 9 p.m. on Thursday, and the paper tells supporters to refresh the page after each vote so they can vote as often as they like. That is an unusually open rule for a reader poll, and it means a nominee's supporters may return day after day inside a single round rather than being cut off after their initial ballot.

The weekly window runs from Monday morning through Thursday night, so every round is framed by the paper's sports week rather than by a weekend. Once a round closes, as the linked May 26-30 poll has, the Tribune's next weekly ballot takes over, and the voting link on this page points at the most recent round the paper has published. A supporter arriving midweek should read the dates in the poll title before assuming a round is still open. The Tribune's printed directions mention no account, login or sign-up step; the paper's instructions begin and end with opening the page and voting.

Where the Cheboygan ballot fits among Michigan player of the week polls

Cheboygan's ballot is the single-town entry in a wider Michigan set of weekly high school sports polls. Elsewhere in the state, bigger newsrooms run their own versions: 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 MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week each tie their weekly honor to a single sport, while the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week takes nominations from across Michigan rather than a single community.

What separates the Cheboygan poll is scale and breadth. It belongs to a hometown newspaper rather than a larger newsroom's regional brand, and its slate follows whatever is producing standouts that week; the May 26-30 ballot carried softball and baseball nominees, a mix a football-only ballot would never show. The Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week sit between the two models, pairing local coverage with larger population centers. Cheboygan nominees face a short weekly slate of area athletes rather than a statewide roster, which gives a well-organized local drive more relative weight than the same effort would earn on one of the statewide ballots.

Building steady support during a Cheboygan voting week

Because the Tribune lets supporters vote as often as they like until the 9 p.m. Thursday close, a nominee's week rewards repetition: classmates, teammates and local readers can return to the poll every day of the window rather than settling for a single visit. The ballot lives at a single poll.fm address that the Tribune publishes through cheboygannews.com, so the starting point for any supporter is voting on the ballot the paper itself posted, checking the dates in its title to be sure the round is still open. Each slate is short and covers only that week's standouts, and the following week brings a fresh poll, which keeps a nominee's window brief and makes early-week sharing worthwhile. Supporters who want a fuller playbook for drives like this can read our guide on getting more votes online. The Tribune has not published a policy statement on outside assistance beyond its voting instructions, so anything beyond direct voting deserves a close read of the terms printed with each ballot.