For The Cal Athlete Of The Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the For The Cal Athlete Of The Year Poll is and who runs it

The For The Cal Athlete Of The Year Poll is a high school sports vote open to the public, run by WENJ, a New Jersey radio station whose sports operation publishes at 973espn.com. The vote is published at the station's own web address, with no third-party balloting service in between, and its full title on the page is Vote For the CAL Athlete of the Year! [POLL].

The page text around the poll frames the vote as a weekly recognition: it presents candidates for CAL athlete of the week and asks readers to vote for their favorite. Sponsorship is local. Bunting Family Pharmacy of Northfield is named on the page as the business bringing the candidates to the audience, which places the poll inside the station's South Jersey high school sports coverage and not part of any national award program.

WENJ's site carries the usual markers of a commercial sports station: on-air content, a scoreboard, and coverage of the Philadelphia professional teams its New Jersey audience follows. The athlete poll sits inside that coverage as an engagement feature, giving listeners a direct stake in which local high school athlete gets recognized.

Because the ballot is published at WENJ's own domain, everything a supporter needs is on one page: the candidates, the sponsor line, and the voting click. There is no separate platform login and no external contest site to navigate.

The dated record for the CAL Athlete of the Year ballot

The poll has a long and slightly uneven history on the station's site. Confirmed editions ran in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2026. No edition is confirmed for 2022 or 2024, so the series has skipped years even though it qualifies as an annual program on the strength of its six confirmed cycles.

The voting window falls in March. That month-level timing is what the station's page supports; the ballot page itself does not state the exact opening and closing days, so those day-level boundaries are a detail to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The page carrying the poll was published on March 23, 2012, under the byline of the station's sports staff, which shows the format predates the confirmed edition years by a wide margin. The 2019 through 2026 span is the stretch with confirmed editions, not the full life of the feature.

Several details are absent from the station's page. No rules section appears on the ballot page: there is no per-supporter vote cap, no one-vote-per-day wording, and no eligibility statement. The station also lists no round dates for this market in its own promotion structure. Those gaps mean a supporter planning a serious push has to work from what the live page shows on the day, not from a standing published policy.

How a supporter votes on the CAL Athlete of the Year poll today

Voting here takes one visit and one click. The supporter goes to the page at 973espn.com/vote-for-the-cal-athlete-of-the-year-poll/, reads the candidates presented for CAL athlete recognition, and clicks for a favorite. The page's own wording does the inviting: vote here for your favorite.

Because the poll sits at the station's own web address, there is no platform account to create and no external service to trust between the supporter and the click. The page loads with the station's normal sports content around it, the sponsor line from Bunting Family Pharmacy of Northfield above the prompt, and the candidates below.

Three things the page does not specify matter to anyone organizing support. First, the day-level boundaries of the March window are not printed, so a supporter cannot tell from the page alone whether the poll closes mid-month or at month's end. Second, there is no published limit on repeat participation, so coming back another day is either allowed silently or blocked by whatever the poll applies on the day. Third, no eligibility wording appears, so nothing on the page restricts who may take part.

The practical consequence is that the live page is the sole source of truth. A supporter who wants certainty about the closing day or the repeat-participation rule has to read the ballot itself during the window rather than rely on any standing document.

Where this ballot sits among New Jersey's high school vote programs

New Jersey hosts many high school athlete votes, and this poll differs from most of its neighbours in one structural way: it is published at the organizer's own web address. The Asbury Park Press High School Athlete of the Week and the Courier-Post South Jersey Girls Basketball Player of the Week are newspaper programs, while the Jersey Sports Zone Football Game Ball belongs to a dedicated high school sports outlet.

The state's other recurring votes include the New Jersey High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the New Jersey High School Football Player of the Week, and the NJ MileSplit Boys Performer of the Week. A different publisher runs each of those votes, and each sets its own window and rules.

What makes the WENJ poll distinct is the combination of a radio audience, a local pharmacy sponsor from Northfield, and a March window. Most of the state's other votes key off a single sport or a single publisher's news cycle. This one is framed around the CAL conference the station covers, and its title promises a year-end honor even as its page text presents weekly candidates, a blend no other New Jersey program on this list shares.

For a supporter, that means tactics that work on a newspaper poll do not transfer automatically. The audience is listeners, the sponsor is local, and the calendar is spring rather than fall.

Strengthening support for a CAL candidate

Support in this poll starts with the station's own audience. The ballot is promoted through WENJ's sports coverage, so a candidate's strongest asset is a school community willing to share the poll link during the March window: team group chats, the athletic department's social accounts, and family networks. Because the page presents the candidates plainly and asks for a single click, friction is low and a well-timed share can move real numbers.

The ballot page has no rules section, which cuts both ways. Nothing printed restricts how a supporter campaigns, and nothing printed promises tolerance for automated voting either. A push that looks like ordinary community enthusiasm is the safest posture on any media poll, and this one is no exception. For tactics that stay on the right side of an organizer's rules, our votes guide covers outreach, timing, and share mechanics that work across public ballots.

Timing matters more here than on some neighbours, because the window is a single March cycle rather than a year-round feature. Concentrate effort early in the window rather than assuming the page will announce a deadline; it does not print one.