Vote! Vote for this week's The Daily Telegram Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Daily Telegram Athlete of the Week poll is

This program is a weekly reader poll run by The Daily Telegram, a newspaper based in Michigan whose web presence sits at lenconnect.com. Each week during a season, the paper names a slate of high school athletes from its coverage area and asks readers to pick a favorite on a simple one-question ballot. The winner of each weekly poll takes the Athlete of the Week title for that award week.

The voting itself happens on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), a general-purpose polling service. That matters for a supporter in practical terms: every weekly edition is a standalone poll with its own number and its own web address, so the ballot for the Feb. 9 to Feb. 15 week is a different page from the ballot for the week before or after it. A link shared by a friend only works while that week's poll is open.

The confirmed ballot is titled as a vote for this week's Athlete of the Week covering Feb. 9 to Feb. 15 and is marked closed. Its answer list pairs individual nominees with their school and sport, drawn from girls basketball, wrestling and other programs the paper covers. Because nominees are prep students, this reference page does not repeat their names; the live ballot is where they should be read.

For a weekly series, the structure is deliberately lightweight: no entry form, no fee, no account. The publisher posts the ballot, readers click, and the tally speaks for itself at close.

The dated record of the Athlete of the Week series

The series carries confirmed seasons in 2021, 2022 and 2026. Those three years are supported by thirty-two ballots collected across the series, which is consistent with a weekly format: a season that runs one poll per award week quickly accumulates a dozen or more distinct ballots, and three such seasons account for that volume. The series is treated as annual and expected to continue in 2027, though the publisher has not printed a forward calendar saying so in advance.

The single dated window attached to the confirmed ballot is Feb. 9 to Feb. 15, a poll now marked closed. That week sits in February, matching the month attached to the ballot's voting phase, and suggests the series runs through the Michigan winter sports season rather than only the fall football calendar. No closing hour for a weekly ballot, and no start or end dates for any season as a whole, are printed by the publisher.

Several facts a supporter might want are simply not published. The ballot page lists no rules text, so the per-person vote limit, any daily-return allowance, the eligibility criteria and the exact opening and closing hours of each weekly window all go unstated there; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The gap between the confirmed seasons, with 2021 and 2022 on the books and the trail resuming in 2026, is worth reading carefully. Those three seasons are the confirmed ones and no others, so this page claims annual status from the shape of the series without asserting that every intervening year ran.

How to vote in this week's Athlete of the Week poll

Voting takes one visit to one page. During an open award week, the newspaper publishes the ballot link, usually alongside its sports coverage at lenconnect.com, and the link leads to a Crowdsignal poll page on poll.fm. The page shows the week's nominees as a list of answer options, each naming an athlete with their school and sport.

A supporter scrolls the list, selects one nominee, and submits the answer. No login, fee or registration appears anywhere in the flow on the confirmed ballot, which is typical of Crowdsignal's one-click poll format. After the poll closes, the same page displays the final tally, so a closed ballot is still useful for seeing how the week ended.

Two practical habits follow from the format. First, act inside the week: the confirmed ballot is marked closed, and a vote submitted to a closed poll does not count toward anything. Second, get the current address rather than reusing an old one, because every weekly edition carries its own poll number. The confirmed ballot is poll 16645106; next week's will be a different number entirely.

What the format does not specify is the rate limit. The ballot prints no rule about how often one person or one device may vote in a weekly edition, and the publisher does not restate its policy elsewhere, so a supporter planning to rally votes for a nominee should read the live form's own instructions before mobilizing anyone. Organizers of reader polls generally police obvious manipulation, and a result overturned for padded voting helps nobody, least of all the athlete it was meant to honor.

Anyone weighing outside help can read the legality overview before deciding how far to push.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan has a crowded field of reader-voted high school sports honors, and this series occupies a distinct corner of it. The sibling programs listed on this site are mostly single-sport and city-anchored: the Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the MLive Bay City-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week, and the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week all narrow to football in one metro. This poll instead spans sports, mixing basketball and wrestling nominees on one winter slate.

The organizer differs too. The MLive polls belong to a large statewide media group with separate editions per city, while this one belongs to a single community newspaper serving its own corner of southeast Michigan. The High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week is the closest format cousin, a statewide ballot spanning several sports, and the MLive Kalamazoo football poll rounds out the set.

For a nominee's supporters, that shape cuts both ways. A multi-sport ballot means the competition is not just other schools but other sports with their own fan bases. A single-paper audience is smaller than a statewide one, so a well-organized local push travels further here than it would on a wider ballot, provided the weekly window and any vote limit are respected.

Anyone running support for a nominee across several of these Michigan polls should treat each as its own contest with its own rules, its own window and its own platform quirks, rather than assuming one strategy transfers cleanly between them.