OrthoNebraska Athlete of the Week (Lincoln): How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Journal Star athlete polls exist. Here's how to tell them apart

Search "Lincoln Journal Star athlete of the week" and there's a real chance you land on the wrong ballot. The paper runs two separate weekly recognitions for area prep athletes, not one. One carries the OrthoNebraska name, the same sponsor behind the Omaha World-Herald's athlete poll. The other, branded Liberty First Athlete of the Week, runs under a credit union's sponsorship instead. Different sponsor, different post, same website.

The fastest way to check which ballot you're looking at: read the sponsor line in the post itself. If OrthoNebraska is named, you're on this one. If Liberty First Credit Union is named, you've found the Journal Star's other weekly athlete feature: a separate program with its own nominee count and its own close schedule, covered in more depth on its own Liberty First Athlete of the Week page.

Neither confusion is unusual. Lee Enterprises, which owns both the Lincoln Journal Star and the Omaha World-Herald, runs multiple branded weekly sports features across its Nebraska papers. Knowing which one you're voting in matters more than it sounds. A vote cast for a nominee in one poll does nothing for that same athlete's standing in the other.

What's confirmed about the Lincoln edition, and what still isn't

Three things are solid: the organizer is the Lincoln Journal Star, the section is Prep Extra, and the sponsor is OrthoNebraska. That name is also attached to the Omaha World-Herald's own athlete poll, which is a deliberate branding choice, not a shared ballot. Everything past that gets thinner fast.

That last gap is worth sitting with rather than papering over. The Omaha World-Herald's version of OrthoNebraska's poll has a confirmed Tuesday-noon close and a documented winner list, covered on its own OrthoNebraska Athlete of the Week write-up. Assuming Lincoln runs on an identical schedule just because the sponsor matches would be a guess, not a fact. Two Lee Enterprises papers can brand a poll the same way and still run it on their own editorial clock.

Prep Extra isn't a dedicated voting page: here's the practical difference

Go.Omaha.com/athlete is a short, purpose-built address the Omaha World-Herald hands out specifically for its OrthoNebraska ballot. Lincoln doesn't appear to have an equivalent standalone shortcut in the materials available for this page. Prep Extra is journalstar.com's broader high school sports section, where the weekly nominee post sits alongside other prep coverage rather than living at its own dedicated link.

Practically, that means the current week's ballot is something you find inside Prep Extra rather than bookmark once. A post from three weeks ago with a closed poll and a post from this week can sit near each other in the section's feed, so checking the publish date before you vote is worth the ten seconds it takes.

For the general mechanics that most embedded newspaper fan-vote widgets share (cooldown timers, submission windows, how a poll typically closes), the site's how-to guide walks through the shared patterns before you dig into a specific week's post on journalstar.com.

Lincoln's own prep sports geography, and where a nominee is likely to come from

Lincoln Public Schools runs six comprehensive high schools: Lincoln High, Lincoln East, Lincoln Southwest, Lincoln Southeast, Lincoln Northeast, and Lincoln North Star. That's a dense, single-city Class A field before you even count the smaller programs ringing the capital.

Lincoln Christian sits at the smaller end of that spectrum, a private school whose enrollment is a fraction of any of the six LPS buildings. Just outside city limits, Waverly and Ashland-Greenwood compete as Class B programs with tighter, more concentrated communities than a Lincoln Class A school draws on. Norris, based in Firth south of the city, rounds out the Lincoln-adjacent field that regularly shows up in the paper's prep coverage.

None of that tells you which school an OrthoNebraska nominee will come from in any given week: sports, seasons, and performances rotate, and no confirmed nominee list for this edition is on the public record. What it does explain is why a small-enrollment program can end up on the same weekly ballot as a six-times-larger Lincoln public school: geography, not enrollment, decides who's eligible.

Running a campaign when the rulebook isn't published

No confirmed close time means the safest plan treats the live Prep Extra post as the actual rulebook, checked fresh each week rather than assumed from memory or from a different Nebraska poll's schedule. That single habit avoids the most common mistake with this kind of newspaper ballot: sharing a link after the window has quietly closed.

Once the post is live, sharing the direct article URL, not a screenshot and not just the athlete's name, keeps the path from a group chat or a booster email to an actual vote at one click. A school community that moves fast in the first day a post goes up typically has an easier time than one that waits and hopes the poll stays open longer than it does.

For campaigns that have already reached everyone in their organic network and still want more turnout before an unpublished deadline passes, sports fan-poll vote support exists for open ballots of exactly this type; the safe approach is real, paced reach rather than anything that looks automated. Questions about what's allowed under a poll's own terms belong on the site's legality page, and the general playbook for building support ahead of a vote sits at the online voting guide. Nebraska runs more than one open fan vote worth knowing about: Best of Grand Island and Best of Kearney use the same open-ballot format for local business categories, and the full Nebraska contest directory lines up every program the state runs side by side.