Star Tribune Minnesota Athletes of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why a newsroom pick, not a ballot, fits Minnesota's oddball map of hockey towns

Warroad has about seventeen hundred people and a hockey trophy case heavier than towns ten times its size. Eden Prairie, forty minutes from downtown Minneapolis, graduates a class larger than Warroad's entire population most years. Both kinds of schools turn up, in different weeks, inside the Star Tribune's StribVarsity high school sports vertical at varsity.startribune.com. That only works because nobody there is counting clicks.

Minnesota High School Athletes of the Week is an editorial pick, not a public ballot. Coaches, parents, and readers send nominations by email; the StribVarsity sports desk reviews what comes in and names its weekly honorees from that pool, drawn from Minnesota State High School League member schools statewide. No vote widget sits on the page. No running tally updates while the week plays out. The selection happens off-screen, the way a newspaper column worked for decades before anyone built a poll plugin for it.

That structure matters more in Minnesota than it might somewhere flatter. A raw popularity vote would let the state's biggest suburban conferences win most weeks on sheer numbers, the way it can on fan-voted ballots elsewhere. An editorial process can put a Warroad goaltender's shutout next to a Wayzata sprinter's state-qualifying time and judge them on the performance, not on which town has more phones. Whether the StribVarsity desk actually weighs it that way isn't published anywhere; the mechanic itself, though, is built to allow it. For how Minnesota's other statewide recognition programs handle the same tension between big schools and small ones, the Minnesota contest directory lays out the full picture.

How a nomination becomes a published Athlete of the Week, and what isn't public

Start with what's confirmed. The feature runs weekly, timed to the Minnesota State High School League calendar, and lives at varsity.startribune.com under the "Minnesota High School Athletes of the Week" banner. Nominations arrive by email to the StribVarsity desk; the sports staff reads the pool and writes up its picks. There's no cap to report, no per-device rule, no closing bell on a Sunday night, because there's no ballot for any of those rules to apply to.

Six honorees are confirmed by name across that January-to-May stretch. This page won't repeat student names or guess at which school each one represents; that level of detail belongs to the weekly feature itself, not to a program-mechanics guide. What the confirmed span does establish is a pattern: the six examples spread across winter months and spring months alike, suggesting the column runs continuously through the season rather than sitting dormant for long stretches, even without a single vote total attached to any of it.

Minnesota's college hockey pipeline gives some sense of scale for how deep the winter talent pool runs here. The Hobey Baker Award fan vote, college hockey's top individual honor at the NCAA Division I level, has historically drawn a heavy share of its nominee list from Minnesota-developed players — a pattern that starts with exactly the kind of high school season this StribVarsity column is built to catch.

The Twin Cities suburbs and the Greater Minnesota programs both feed this pool

Split Minnesota's high school sports map in two and you get the Twin Cities metro on one side and everything else on the other. Eden Prairie, Wayzata, Edina, Lakeville North, and Maple Grove anchor the metro side: big enrollment, deep coaching staffs, multiple sports fielding varsity-caliber teams in the same building. Hopkins High School, in Minnetonka, carries a boys basketball tradition that's produced more gym banners than most college programs manage. DeLaSalle and Totino-Grace, both private schools, draw citywide rather than from one attendance zone, which changes who's eligible to be nominated compared with a single-district public school.

Greater Minnesota runs on a different logic. Warroad, up against the Canadian border, calls itself Hockeytown USA without much argument from anyone who has seen the banners in its rink. Hermantown and Duluth East carry the same Iron Range hockey seriousness a couple hours south. St. Thomas Academy, a private school in Mendota Heights, has built a hockey and wrestling reputation bigger than its enrollment numbers would predict. Moorhead, out on the North Dakota border, and Northfield, an hour south of the Twin Cities, round out a geography that stretches the length of the state.

None of that geography shows up in a vote count here, which is the point. A nomination from a Warroad coach competes on the same footing as one from an Eden Prairie athletic director, because the desk reading both isn't tallying phones or emails, just the performance described in each one. Baseball and softball nominees, once spring arrives, draw from that same statewide map; the Minnesota High School Baseball Player of the Week program covers that spring window through its own separate mechanic, worth knowing about if a nomination misses this broader feature but fits a single-sport ballot better. Minnesota's biggest reader-vote program, meanwhile, sits outside sports entirely: the Minnesota's Best readers'-choice awards run on an actual public ballot, a genuinely different mechanic from the one covered on this page.

What actually strengthens a nomination when there's no tally to inflate

Ask how to "get votes" for this one and the question doesn't quite apply. There's no widget, no share link, no six-hour cooldown to game. What exists instead is an inbox the StribVarsity desk has to sort through, and some submissions are simply easier to act on than others.

Specificity does the work a vote count would do elsewhere. A nomination naming the sport, the opponent, the date, and the actual stat line, say, a goaltender's save total in a shutout, or a sprinter's state-meet qualifying mark, gives an editor something concrete to verify and write around. "Best player on the team" does not. Neither does a nomination that arrives after the week it describes has already passed; a newsroom working on a weekly deadline has limited room to circle back.

Volume from more than one source helps too, in a different way than it would on a fan ballot. A coach, a parent, and a teammate's family independently sending in the same name reads as broader, organic attention rather than one household pushing hard for a single result. That's not a rule anyone at the Star Tribune has published; it's simply how editorial judgment tends to weigh a pool of submissions when some names show up once and others show up from three directions. For the general mechanics of building visibility around any nomination-based recognition, not just this one, the how-to library covers tactics that apply whether or not a program counts raw votes. Because this program has no ballot to add votes to, a nomination and visibility support service built around documentation and reach is the closer fit here than anything marketed as vote delivery.

How this compares with Minnesota's other weekly athlete polls

Confusing this with Minnesota's other "Athlete of the Week" program is an easy mistake, and it happens often enough to address directly. High School on SI, the Sports Illustrated prep vertical, runs its own weekly Minnesota Athlete of the Week at si.com, a genuine fan ballot: unlimited human votes per reader, automated scripts banned and grounds for disqualification, closing every Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT with a Monday winner. That program and the Star Tribune's are both weekly, both statewide, both free. The similarity ends at the mechanic. One counts votes. The other reads submissions and makes a call.

Regional papers add more texture to the map. The Brainerd Dispatch's Best of the Best covers the Brainerd Lakes Area specifically, a reader-vote program built around local business and community categories rather than prep sports, a reminder that "Minnesota" and "Star Tribune" don't automatically mean the same mechanic twice, even within the same state's media market.

Knowing which bucket a program falls into changes what's worth doing about it. On a countable ballot, sustained voter turnout is the entire game, and paid vote support can genuinely add to a tally. On an editorial pick like this one, nothing about how many people click a link changes the outcome. What we've said above about strengthening a nomination is the honest version of "campaign strategy" for a program built this way; anyone weighing whether paid support fits a specific Minnesota program, sport-related or not, can check the mechanic first at the state contest directory, then read our legal-and-terms guide on how paid support maps differently across countable ballots and editorial picks. Where a program does run on a real ballot, the general vote-buying overview covers what's realistic to expect, and the national fan-vote index shows how that split between vote-counted and editorially-picked programs plays out across every state on this site, not just Minnesota.