Who gets your vote for MLive Bay City Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

An all-sports weekly ballot in a market of football questions

Most ballots in MLive's Michigan high school series narrow the question to football. The Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week all ask readers to pick a football player. The Bay City ballot asks a broader question: who gets your vote for Athlete of the Week, across the athletes MLive Bay City salutes each week of the season.

The organizer is MLive Bay City, the regional newsroom covering Bay City, Michigan, and the ballot itself is published on Crowdsignal through the poll.fm service, the polling tool MLive uses for its reader questions. The current round is reachable at poll.fm/17445423, and it lists nominees by name alongside their schools, including Bay City Central, Bay City Western, John Glenn and Pinconning. A statewide alternative from a different publisher, the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week, covers a wider area, and there is also a football-specific MLive Bay City-Area High School Football Player of the Week from the same newsroom.

Facts at a glance

What the dated record shows

The series is a weekly one, and each year of ballots counts as one edition of the programme. Confirmed edition years are 2021, 2022 and 2023, and then 2024, 2025 and 2026, drawn from the rounds MLive Bay City has published on poll.fm across those seasons. The 2026 edition is live through the autumn sports season, and the current ballot closes on Thursday, September 17.

Across the calendar, rounds appear from September into the following June, matching the school sports year rather than a single fall football season. That September-to-June span is what separates this programme from the football-only questions beside it, which concentrate on the autumn weeks.

What the ballot page does not print is the schedule of the remaining weekly rounds for the rest of the 2026 season, so the date of the next ballot and each round's open and close times, confirm on the live ballot each cycle. MLive also has not printed a category breakdown beyond the single athlete of the week question.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The mechanic is deliberately simple. Open the poll.fm round, read the nominee list, click the circle beside the athlete you back, and submit. That is the entire action, and it needs no account, no login and no email confirmation on the ballot itself.

MLive's published guidance for the 2026 ballot states the frequency rule plainly: repeat votes are unlimited until the poll closes on Thursday, September 17. That makes this ballot unusually open compared with rounds that impose a once-per-day limit, and it means a supporter's return visits all count while the round is open.

Getting onto the ballot works differently from voting. Coaches and athletic directors are encouraged to nominate athletes by contacting the MLive Bay City reporter by email, and MLive notes that email voting is not permitted. In other words, nominations travel by email, but the votes themselves must be cast on the Crowdsignal poll page. A fan cannot email a vote in, and a coach cannot nominate by commenting on the story. The weekly rotation also means each round carries its own nominee list, so the athletes on the current poll are not the same names from week to week.

Strengthening support before the Thursday close

Because MLive allows unlimited repeat voting, the practical lever in this programme is organized return visits. A student section, a family group or a team chat that votes each day from nomination to the Thursday close accumulates far more than a single push, and the organizer's stated rule makes those repeats legitimate. The closing time on Thursday, September 17 is the hard edge, so spacing votes across the week matters more than one late burst.

MLive's rules govern everything else. The ballot permits email nominations from coaches and athletic directors but forbids email voting, so any outside help still has to land on the poll page itself to count. Our guide to getting more votes online walks through the tactics that fit unlimited-vote public rounds like this one.

Where this ballot sits among its Michigan neighbours

Within a short radius on this site, MLive Bay City fields two ballots at once: this all-sports Athlete of the Week and a separate football player of the week for the same area. That split is worth understanding before a supporter picks a link. An athlete nominated for cross country, soccer, golf or swimming belongs on this ballot, while a football standout can appear on either, and the two polls run on the same Crowdsignal account under the same newsroom.

Beyond Bay City, the MLive pattern repeats in Flint, Jackson, Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor, each a football player of the week for its own market, and none of them share a ballot with this one. A vote cast on the Bay City page counts only here and not toward the other markets. High School on SI runs the widest alternative, a Michigan athlete of the week that spans the whole state under a different publisher. What makes the Bay City ballot distinct is the combination of a weekly all-sports question, an unlimited repeat-vote rule from the organizer, and a nominee list that rotates with each week's saluted performances across the Bay City coverage area.