OrthoNebraska Athlete of the Week (Omaha World-Herald): How Voting Works & How to Win

Six sports, one ballot: what the 2025–2026 winner list reveals

The fastest way to understand this poll is to read its winner list. Over 2025–2026, OrthoNebraska Athlete of the Week went to a wrestler, a career scoring leader in boys basketball, a Class B girls basketball player who scored 23 points in a state championship game, a swimmer who broke a state record in the 100 butterfly, a track athlete, a baseball player with five RBI in a single game, and a boys soccer player. Seven confirmed winners. Seven different sports.

That breadth is not incidental — it is the structural identity of this award. Where most weekly high school polls are tied to football season or one dominant sport, the Omaha World-Herald runs this ballot across every NSAA season. The same four-nominee format, the same Tuesday noon CT deadline, the same Go.Omaha.com/athlete voting page, across the full school year.

Tyson Terry won for wrestling at Omaha North in January 2025. Drew Kulus won for basketball at Omaha Concordia — the school's all-time career scoring leader at 1,165 points — sometime around February 2026. Meredith Peyton of Omaha Marian won for swimming after setting a state record in the 100 butterfly. Pierce Parker of Bellevue West won for track in May 2026. Eli Murray of Omaha North (already a multi-sport athlete known for basketball and football) won for baseball in April with five RBI. Macie Reiner of Bennington, a Class B school, won for girls basketball.

Read that list and you see something. Omaha North appears twice — for wrestling and baseball, two different athletes, two different seasons. Omaha metro Class A schools dominate. But Bennington won. A Class B program from outside the metro core beat the Omaha schools when it had the performance and the turnout to back it up. That is the actual mechanics of this poll: classification does not cap the result. Votes do.

The Omaha metro's school topology — and why it matters for this ballot

Omaha's prep sports scene is dense in a way that surprises people unfamiliar with the city. The NSAA Class A metro has programs ranging from Omaha Westside and Millard South — consistent state title contenders in football and basketball — to Omaha Creighton Prep, a Jesuit school whose alumni network runs deep into Omaha business and civic life. Luther Harrington won the OrthoNebraska award for Creighton Prep's soccer program. That alumni network is not an abstraction.

Omaha North, which produced two confirmed winners in one school year (Terry in wrestling, Murray in baseball), sits in north Omaha — a community where school identity is tight and social reach within the school's network is fast. Both wins came in sports that are not the ballot's most prominent: wrestling in January, baseball in April. Which means the wins were not carried by sport popularity. They were carried by a school that turns out when its athlete is nominated.

Then there is Omaha Marian — an all-girls Catholic school whose swimming program produces state-level talent and whose parent and alumnae community is among the most organized in the metro. Meredith Peyton's win for a state-record butterfly swim is not just a performance result. It is also a signal about how quickly a tight, motivated community can move a four-person ballot before Tuesday's noon close.

The schools on the ballot's historical winner list are not the largest by enrollment. They are the ones whose communities treated Tuesday morning as a deadline worth keeping.

Tuesday noon CT — the deadline that runs faster than it looks

The Tuesday noon CT close is the single most important logistical fact about this poll. Not Tuesday at midnight. Not end-of-business. Noon.

That is earlier than the Lincoln Journal Star's Liberty First Athlete of the Week, which has closed as late as 2 p.m. Wednesday in confirmed weeks. It means campaigns that start Monday have less than 24 hours, not 36 or 48. And it means the people who find out about the ballot Tuesday morning — from a social post, a group chat, a school announcement — are arriving with hours to spare, not days.

Four nominees instead of five or six also compresses the race. In a four-person field there is no long tail to dilute the leader. A nominee who goes into Monday with a meaningful share of their community mobilized is in a structurally better position than in a larger field where every vote is more diluted. The narrow ballot and the early Tuesday close together mean this is a sprint, not an endurance event.

Running the campaign before Tuesday noon

The confirmed winner list from 2025–2026 spans seven sports. That matters for campaign planning. In football or basketball season the school community is already paying attention; the team's game-day network is warm. In baseball or track season, the awareness radius is smaller — parents of the specific sport, the athlete's own friend group, the school's spring-sports booster account. The campaign has to do more work to reach beyond the sport's core.

Two things are always true regardless of sport. First, Go.Omaha.com/athlete is the open-access path to the ballot — the omaha.com article pages require a subscription, and sending fans to a paywalled article loses votes. Share the Go.Omaha.com/athlete link directly. Second, Tuesday morning is the real push window. A post that goes out Sunday or Monday into a school community will generate background volume; a final reminder Tuesday morning, specifically noting that voting closes at noon, converts the people who meant to vote but hadn't.

For anyone who wants additional reach before that cutoff, structured vote support is available for open weekly polls. More on how fan votes in Nebraska and neighboring states are structured can be found at /usa/nebraska/, and the national directory at /usa/ covers comparable polls across the country. The sports fan-poll service is the most direct option for this type of open-ballot weekly award.