Elko Daily Champion Chevrolet Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A rural county votes against a metro. That's the entire premise here

Put an Elko County nominee on the same statewide ballot as a Las Vegas metro athlete and the outcome is predictable before a single vote is cast. Clark County School District alone dwarfs every rural Nevada county combined, and its alumni networks, boosters, and social reach scale accordingly. So the Elko Daily Free Press (elkodaily.com) doesn't try. It runs its own Champion Chevrolet Athlete of the Week, sized to the Elko market, with separate boys and girls ballots published weekly during the NIAA calendar.

Nominations go to the sports desk at [email protected]. A 2025 article was promoted publicly as "Cast your vote for Champion Chevrolet Girls Athlete of the Week," running alongside a companion boys ballot: two articles, two nominee lists, two winners, every week. No account is required to vote and there's no cost. For how these fan-vote formats work more broadly, see how fan-poll voting works; for the wider state picture, the Nevada fan-vote roundup covers what else is running.

One dealership, three unrelated ballots

Champion Chevrolet sponsors this poll. It also sponsors the Reno Gazette-Journal's own Athlete of the Week program in the Reno-Sparks metro. Same dealership name, zero shared infrastructure: different outlet, different nominees, different winners, published at rgj.com rather than elkodaily.com. Confusing the two costs a nominee real votes if a supporter lands on the wrong site during a busy week.

Add a third program to the mix: the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Nevada High School Athlete of the Week, run through Nevada Preps, which does pull from both Southern and Northern Nevada schools on one statewide ballot with a Thursday-noon close. It's the only one of the three with any Elko County overlap at all, and even then the ballot's center of gravity sits in Clark County.

Elko is the gateway to Nevada's mining and ranching country, and its school communities cluster around a handful of programs rather than splitting across dozens of competing metro campuses. That's not a disadvantage in a weekly popularity poll. A single town rallying behind one kid can out-mobilize a much larger, more diffuse metro population, simply because everyone already knows each other. For the season-long version of this same idea, see the Nevada High School Player of the Year program; for the state's business-recognition side, Best of Nevada.

What actually gets a kid nominated

An email to [email protected]. That's the mechanism: no online form, no committee meeting. But the content matters, school, sport, opponent, and a performance summary tight enough that a small sports desk covering a huge, sparsely populated county can act on it fast. Miss the opponent name or the final score and the submission sits.

Boys and girls ballots run concurrently, mirroring the structure Reno Gazette-Journal uses for its own version. Voting happens in the embedded widget on the live article; no login, no subscription, and no location check. An Elko alum now living three states away votes exactly like someone at the fairgrounds this weekend. New to this kind of ballot generally? The guide to real votes covers how legitimate fan-vote polls run nationwide.

One plain caveat: Elko Daily doesn't publish raw vote totals or margins publicly, so there's no historical data here to point to a specific past winner's numbers. Confirm the current week's close time and any per-device limits on the live article (they're set week to week, not fixed for the season).

Running a campaign sized to an actual small town

Skip the generic playbook. In Elko County the real channel isn't "social media" in the abstract, it's the specific group text between a graduating class, the booster page for a 300-student school, the family thread that includes cousins in Spring Creek and an aunt in Jackpot. Name the athlete, the school, the sport, and the link. Ambiguity is what kills a share before it converts to a vote.

A well-organized single town outperforms a scattered effort across a wider area, and that's truer here than almost anywhere else in Nevada. So lean into it. Once a nominee's own network (teammates, classmates, coaches, family, town groups) has been fully activated, some households look at buy votes online to supplement organic reach for the remaining stretch. Browse the full USA contest directory for other Northern Nevada and nationwide programs like this one.