Vote for the Hillsdale Daily News Athlete of the Week: Snow Day Edition: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Snow Day Edition poll is and who runs it

The Vote for the Hillsdale Daily News Athlete of the Week: Snow Day Edition is a reader award poll produced by the Hillsdale Daily News, a Michigan newspaper publishing at hillsdale.net. The paper covers high school sports across the Hillsdale area, and the Snow Day Edition is its winter take on the athlete of the week format, timed to the holiday and snow-season stretch of the Michigan school sports calendar.

Ballot software is supplied by Crowdsignal (poll.fm). The voting address for this series is poll.fm/16581629, a Crowdsignal page that presents the nominated athletes as clickable options and returns a tally after each submission. Crowdsignal is a common host for newsroom polls of this kind, and it handles the voting mechanics while the newspaper handles nomination, promotion and results.

The ballot's audience is the paper's readership in and around Hillsdale, Michigan, with nominees drawn from winter sports programmes at area schools. Schools named on the recent ballot include Litchfield, North Adams-Jerome, Reading and Jonesville, representing girls and boys basketball, wrestling and boys bowling.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: which editions ran and when the window falls

Three editions of the Snow Day Edition are on the published timeline: 2021, 2022 and 2026. That spacing marks it as an annual fixture of the paper's winter coverage rather than a weekly series, with each edition running as its own numbered Crowdsignal poll. The gap between the 2022 and 2026 editions is part of that timeline as it stands.

The polling span for the series sits between November and February, which lines up with the Michigan high school winter sports season. Within that span, the 2026 edition carried a printed deadline: the Hillsdale Daily News told readers its poll for reader selections would remain open until January 18, 2026, in coverage promoting a holiday-season ballot for the 2025-26 winter. That coverage is the reason the close date can be stated with confidence while other dates cannot.

Several facts about the timing are simply not printed anywhere in the ballot material. The publisher has not stated the day each poll opens, and no round dates for the platform appear in any promotion for this market. The list of ballot categories beyond the athlete of the week framing, and any eligibility terms for nominees, are likewise absent, and the exact structure of future editions should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Snow Day Edition ballot today

Casting a ballot here takes almost no effort. A supporter loads poll.fm/16581629, waits for the Crowdsignal page to render, and reads the option list. Every option pairs a nominated athlete with a school and a winter sport, so a Jonesville wrestling supporter and a Reading wrestling supporter are choosing between separate lines on the same ballot rather than separate polls.

Voting is a click: select the radio button for the chosen athlete, press the submit button beneath the list, and Crowdsignal registers the choice and shows the running tally. No registration, payment or separate nomination form stands between the supporter and the ballot; nomination is the newspaper's job, done through its own sports coverage. The 2026 ballot ran through January 18, 2026, after which the page flipped to a closed notice.

What the ballot leaves unsaid is how often the same person may vote. A per-person limit, a daily return rule, and any restriction tied to device or network are not printed in the material available for this edition. Crowdsignal does give publishers tools to constrain repeat voting, but whether the Hillsdale Daily News has switched any of them on for this poll is not stated. The wording shown on the live ballot at the moment of submission is therefore the only rule a supporter can rely on, and it can differ from edition to edition.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan carries a crowded field of reader polls honouring high school athletes, and the Snow Day Edition is the Hillsdale County corner of it. Its neighbours on this site cover bigger markets: 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.

Two further football-focused polls round out the set: the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week, geographically the closest of the six to Hillsdale, and the MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week. A statewide option also exists in the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week.

What separates the Snow Day Edition from all of them is scope and season. The neighbours are football polls tied to autumn schedules, while this ballot spans the winter sports slate, from basketball to wrestling to bowling, and brands itself around snow-season timing. It is also the only one of the group run by a small-city daily paper rather than a metro newsroom or a national network, which keeps the nominee list short and the voting community local.

Strengthening support in a short winter window

Because the Snow Day Edition polls run inside a compressed winter stretch and the 2026 ballot closed on January 18, 2026, momentum matters more here than in a season-long football poll. A nominee's realistic base is the school community named on the ballot line, so circulating the poll.fm address through team accounts, booster groups and family messages while the poll is open is the straightforward path. Since the newspaper prints no rule on repeat visits for this edition, any push built on daily returns should be checked against the live ballot wording before it starts. For a fuller rundown of supporter tactics that fit a publisher-run poll like this one, see our votes guide at get more votes online.