New Hampshire SI Athlete of the Week; Winter Season: How Voting Works & How to Win

What actually feeds the winter ballot

Five sports, not one. That's the thing readers coming from the fall or football editions of this poll tend to miss first. The winter window pulls nominees from boys' and girls' basketball, ice hockey, wrestling, indoor track and field, and swimming and diving — the full NHIAA winter slate, run under the same High School on SI banner and the same si.com/high-school/new-hampshire page as every other seasonal edition.

A wrestler pinning his way through a Division I bracket and a swimmer shaving a second off a 200 free time both land on the same weekly ballot as a basketball guard who dropped thirty. The poll makes no distinction by sport when tallying votes; one winner per week, whichever nominee pulls the most clicks. That flattening is worth understanding before anything else, because it changes which towns have real incentive to check the page on a given Wednesday — a ski-country town near the Mount Washington Valley, where winter identity runs through the whole calendar, engages with this ballot differently than a wrestling stronghold further south. For how fan-vote polls in general get structured and scored, the guide to buying votes online lays out the mechanics before the New Hampshire specifics below.

How the winter edition compares with NH's other SI polls

Same organizer, same site, different cast of characters depending on the calendar. The table below lines up the winter edition against the two other seasonal SI polls covering New Hampshire prep sports.

The mechanics don't shift between seasons. What shifts is the eligible sport list and, by extension, which New Hampshire communities show up on the ballot most often during any given stretch. A February week belongs to basketball and hockey towns the way an October week belongs to football towns.

The Sunday close and the six days before it

No searchable archive of prior winter winners exists for this specific seasonal edition — that's the honest starting point. What's confirmed is the rhythm: a new article publishes mid-week with that week's nominee field, the embedded widget takes votes continuously, and the ballot closes Sunday night. High School on SI typically posts the result in a follow-up piece on the same hub shortly after.

Weather is the one variable that doesn't show up in any table. A snowed-out wrestling dual or a postponed hockey game can push a nominee's qualifying performance back a few days, which occasionally shifts which week a strong showing actually lands on the ballot. Nothing about the six days between publish and close changes because of it — the calendar just moves underneath.

Where the winter nominee pool actually comes from

Manchester Central, the two Nashua schools, and Concord sit inside New Hampshire's most basketball-dense corridor; gyms that fill on a Tuesday night in January the way football stadiums fill on an October Friday. Pinkerton Academy, drawing from six surrounding towns rather than one, brings a wrestling and hockey tradition that pulls a multi-municipality crowd into the nominee conversation regardless of which single town's name is on the jersey.

Smaller-footprint programs work differently in winter than they did in the fall guide. Bishop Guertin's swim and basketball programs draw students from across southern New Hampshire, not one city's limits. Winnacunnet and Exeter, on the Seacoast, field wrestling and indoor track nominees from towns where the winter sports culture runs through youth hockey associations that existed years before any of these athletes reached high school. Goffstown, a Division III program, can put a wrestler on the same ballot as a Division I basketball nominee from a school ten times its enrollment; the winter ballot applies no division weighting any more than the fall one did.

For the wider New Hampshire fan-vote landscape beyond this one winter window, the New Hampshire contest hub lists the other SBLive and SI programs running across the state, including the year-round New Hampshire High School Football Player of the Week poll and the baseball edition that opens once winter closes out in the spring. Readers whose interest runs toward businesses rather than athletes have a separate track entirely: the Best of New Hampshire program covers restaurants, shops, and services statewide with its own vote-and-nominate structure.

Running a winter campaign without a football-sized crowd

Winter sports don't have Friday-night stadium crowds behind them, and that changes the playbook. A basketball or hockey nominee's realistic voter pool is smaller in raw numbers than a fall football nominee's — but winter teams, especially wrestling and hockey, tend to run on tighter, older networks: a youth hockey association's parent list, a wrestling club's group chat that predates high school by half a decade, a swim team's alumni thread. Those networks convert at a higher rate per person reached than a general school social post does, because everyone on them already cares about the sport specifically.

The click itself asks nothing of the voter. Open the current week's article, find the widget, pick a nominee, done — no email field, no account, no app. That simplicity means reach beats repetition every time; sharing the direct article URL with a hockey parent list moves more votes in an afternoon than one person refreshing the same tab all week. Sharing the athlete's name alone does less, since the URL is what actually gets a supporter from "I heard about this" to a completed click.

Because the winter ballot runs on the same fixed Sunday close as every other SI edition, the Saturday-into-Sunday stretch is typically when trailing campaigns close gaps — supporters who saw the link Wednesday but hadn't acted respond better to a reminder with an actual deadline attached than to a second identical post. Some campaigns bring in outside help once the wrestling club group chat and the hockey parent list have both been tapped; paid vote-support services built for fan polls exist for exactly that scenario, and the ones worth using pace delivery across the window instead of dumping votes at once. The legal overview of vote-buying covers how that practice generally gets treated, useful background before signing up for anything.