Montana High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The variable close time is the thing most people miss

Most weekly prep sports polls pick a day and stick to it. NBC Montana's Athlete of the Week doesn't. The close time shifts week to week, built around the MHSA's rotating tournament calendar, and the only way to know when this week's poll ends is to check the widget on the active poll page at nbcmontana.com. Supporters who plan to vote the night before close and find the poll already shut have lost that window — permanently. That one mechanical fact separates the campaigns that succeed here from the ones that fall short on procedure rather than effort.

The poll itself runs on straightforward terms: NBC Montana's sports desk picks the field, the ballot opens, fans vote with no account and no cost, and the nominee with the most votes when the close time hits is named the winner. The same format covers every MHSA sport across all three seasons — fall football through spring track — and every classification from the largest Class AA programs in Billings and Missoula down to Class C schools where graduating classes run under 25 students. One ballot, one statewide audience, one weekly window with a moving deadline.

The confirmed 2025 winner — Eli Kasberg of Missoula Big Sky, named Football Play of the Year — is the most recent public result on record. NBC Montana doesn't publish raw vote totals for weekly polls, so the leaderboard on the live widget is the only data on how competitive any given week runs. That scarcity of historical numbers is itself worth knowing: going into a week cold, with no benchmark to calibrate against, the safest posture is to treat the window as tight and start mobilizing early rather than late.

Four markets, thirteen Class AA schools, and a state the size of Germany

Understanding which community networks carry weight in this poll requires holding two facts at once. First, Montana is enormous — 147,000 square miles, with Billings and Missoula separated by 344 highway miles, and communities like Glendive and Thompson Falls that most Class AA boosters have never driven through. Second, the digital poll erases that distance entirely. A relative in Billings can vote for a Kalispell Glacier athlete. A former Montana resident now living in Denver counts equally. The state's geography, which defines almost every other aspect of high school athletics here, stops mattering the moment someone clicks a link.

NBC Montana's four broadcast stations — KECI in Missoula, KCFW in Kalispell, KTVM in Butte, and KDBZ in Bozeman — anchor the poll's western and central Montana audience. But the digital platform at nbcmontana.com reaches east to Billings and beyond, and the Class AA schools there appear regularly on the ballot. Billings alone has three: West, Senior, and Skyview. Those three programs collectively draw on the largest single metro area in Montana, with alumni spread across the Yellowstone Valley in numbers that dwarf most other schools' entire community populations.

The Missoula dynamic is different. Sentinel and Hellgate share a city of roughly 75,000, which means when both have nominees in the same week — or in adjacent weeks — the rivalry that plays out on Dornblaser Field carries into group chats and booster pages. The Kalispell split between Glacier and Flathead runs on the same logic: two schools, one city, an active intramarket fan base that knows both programs well.

Bozeman is growing fast enough that Gallatin High, which opened in 2021 as the newest Class AA program in the state, already generates a competitive booster network alongside the established Bozeman High base. Two schools now share a metro whose population has been increasing faster than almost anywhere else in Montana.

Then there are the Class B and C programs. A school of 60 students in a town where nearly every adult knows the athlete personally is not at a structural disadvantage on a fan vote. In fact, the opposite can be true: a tight community that gets the poll link into the right group chat in the first two hours can accumulate a per-capita turnout that Class AA networks — wider and slower to coordinate — rarely match. The poll's most important feature is that enrollment doesn't vote. People do.

Running a campaign when the close time is the unknown variable

Every decision in a Montana Athlete of the Week campaign runs through the same constraint: you do not know in advance when the window closes. The practical response is to start the moment the poll goes live — find the article, confirm the close time, and get the direct link into the first group chat within the first hour. Waiting until the day before close is the plan that falls apart when that day turns out to already be past.

Once the link is moving, the most effective single action is specificity. "Vote for [Name] from [School] in this week's NBC Montana High School Sports poll — link below, closes [actual day and time from widget]" converts. "Hey everyone vote for our kid" does not, not in Montana's dispersed geography where the friction of finding the right poll page stops a meaningful fraction of otherwise willing supporters.

For extended family and former Montana residents now living elsewhere: their votes count equally. The nbcmontana.com poll has no geographic restriction — a sibling in Seattle and a grandparent in Denver vote the same as a fan in Missoula. A campaign that ignores out-of-state alumni is leaving real votes on the table, particularly for Class B and C schools where the local population cap is a real constraint.

The live leaderboard makes mid-window calibration possible. Check it at the midpoint and again with 12 hours left. A 200-vote cushion in a spring golf week is probably fine; the same lead in an October football week when two Billings Class AA schools are also on the ballot is worth treating as a deficit. Because NBC Montana doesn't publish historical totals, the only way to know how competitive a given week is is to watch it unfold live.

When organic reach has been fully deployed and the nominee is still trailing, structured vote support exists for open-poll formats like this. What matters is delivery paced to the per-device cap — rapid injection that ignores the cooldown window is detectable and removed. The broader context for fan-vote campaigns is covered in the Montana contests hub and the full USA contest directory.