KOLN Lincoln Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one question this page needs to answer before anything else

Type "KOLN athlete of the week vote" into a search bar and you land on a real, weekly feature. What you won't find, at least not stated anywhere in the station's own material, is a guarantee that the word "vote" applies the same way every week.

KOLN/KGIN (branded on-air and online as 10/11 NOW, the Lincoln CBS affiliate whose shared call-sign pairing also reaches the Grand Island and Kearney side of the state) publishes a weekly Athlete of the Week feature at 1011now.com. That much is settled. What isn't settled, at least not from anything publicly documented about this specific franchise, is whether a given week's write-up is decided by a reader poll or by the sports desk alone.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Nebraska already runs two other athlete-recognition programs in parallel: the Lincoln Journal Star's Liberty First Athlete of the Week, which nominates five to six athletes and opens a public ballot every week, and the NebPreps Football Player of the Year, which blends a fan vote with a panel score and settles the winner live each December at a Hurrdat Sports Bar event. Both describe their mechanic in plain terms. KOLN's segment doesn't come with that same level of public detail, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong way to open a guide about it.

What's actually confirmed about the KOLN Athlete of the Week

Start with what holds up. The feature runs weekly, it airs on 10/11 NOW's broadcast and posts to 1011now.com, and it covers high school athletes from the Lincoln media market, the same public and private school system that anchors most Lincoln prep sports coverage every season.

Lincoln Northeast is one of the programs confirmed within that coverage footprint. So are Lincoln's other comprehensive public high schools: Lincoln High, Lincoln East, Lincoln North Star, Lincoln Southeast, and Lincoln Southwest, along with Lincoln Pius X and Lincoln Christian, the city's two largest private programs. None of that is a stretch. It's simply the roster of schools that make up the Lincoln prep sports scene KOLN's sports desk covers every week, regardless of which athlete a given profile features.

What isn't confirmed is a nomination email, a public submission form, or a stated close time. That's the kind of detail SBLive publishes plainly for its own Nebraska programs (a named nomination address, a Sunday 11:59 p.m. Central close, no account required to vote). No confirmed KOLN equivalent exists for any of that here. A viewer who wants that level of detail for this specific segment has to check the current week's post directly, because no fixed, publicly documented rule set covers it in advance.

How a KOLN feature compares to Nebraska's other athlete polls, if it runs as a vote

Assume, for a moment, that a given week's KOLN feature does include a reader poll. Plenty of local-TV sports segments run exactly that way, pairing a short profile with an embedded vote widget. If that's the format in a specific week, here's the field it would be joining.

Line those up and the pattern is obvious. Every other program on that list tells the public, in writing, how a winner gets picked. KOLN's page is the outlier here — not because the segment is smaller, but because the "how" isn't spelled out the way it is for its Lincoln and statewide neighbors. That's a gap in the public record, not a knock on the feature itself.

If a poll widget is live on a given week's post, the reasonable assumption (based on how nearly every comparable embedded local-news poll behaves) is a single click, no account, and a running tally visible right away. But a reasonable assumption isn't a confirmed one, and that gap is exactly why checking the live page before mobilizing any campaign is the right first move, not an afterthought.

The Lincoln school system behind this segment

Lincoln Public Schools runs six comprehensive high schools, close enough together that a resident on one side of the city can watch three of them play in the same season. Lincoln High sits nearest downtown. East, Southeast, Southwest, and North Star ring the rest of the city, and Northeast fills out the east side. Add Lincoln Pius X and Lincoln Christian (the two private programs with the deepest athletic history in town), and that's the full field KOLN's cameras are pulling from most weeks.

None of those schools is small by Nebraska standards. Several run Class A programs in most sports, the state's largest enrollment tier, alongside Omaha's biggest public schools. A segment like this one isn't drawing from a scattered field the way a rural-market station might; it's pulling from a genuinely competitive, densely packed Lincoln sports calendar: football Friday night, basketball filling the same gyms two nights later, track and wrestling stacking the winter and spring gaps on top of that.

What that density doesn't tell you is how the station's editors weigh one week's performance against another, or whether the audience gets any say in it. That editorial judgment call (sports-desk pick or open ballot) is the one piece of the picture that stays unconfirmed no matter how well-documented the school system around it is.

What to actually do if this week's post turns out to be a vote

Say you land on 1011now.com during a week where the Athlete of the Week post does include a poll widget. Two things are worth doing first: read the write-up (a name and a stat line with no context is easy to misjudge), and check the post for a stated close date, since local-TV embedded polls often run on a shorter window than a full week.

From there, the mechanics that move any open, public, account-free poll apply here too. A direct link to the specific post, shared with an athlete's team group chat, the booster list, and the school's alumni network, reaches more real voters than one household clicking repeatedly. That holds whether a given poll caps votes per device or leaves it open, and it's the same principle behind the confirmed public ballots at the Journal Star's Liberty First poll and the statewide SBLive vote.

And if that week turns out to be a straight editorial feature with no poll at all? Sharing still matters. It's just sharing the recognition itself rather than a ballot link. For weeks where a real public vote is confirmed live on the page, fan-poll vote support built for exactly this kind of open, embedded ballot exists; for the general mechanics of running any online voting campaign well, the online contest voting guide and the how-to library both cover ground beyond what's specific to KOLN. Nebraska's other reader-choice ballots in the same 10/11 NOW market, Grand Island and Kearney's own Best Of campaigns, sit alongside this one at the Nebraska contest hub.