VOTE for the El Paso Children's Hospital Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the El Paso Children's Hospital Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

This program is a weekly reader poll honoring high school athletes in southern New Mexico. The Las Cruces Sun-News produces the award, nominating a fresh group of athletes every week, and El Paso Children's Hospital sponsors it, which is why the sponsor's name leads the ballot title. The voting itself runs on Crowdsignal under its poll.fm address, the same platform many newsroom polls use, and the current ballot sits at poll.fm/16675968.

The contrast with its neighbors is sharp. The KRQE Mesa Tractor Athlete of the Week comes from an Albuquerque television station and speaks to the whole state, while this ballot is a print-native feature aimed squarely at the Las Cruces sports community. The Albuquerque Journal Readers' Choice and the Best of Santa Fe awards ask readers to pick businesses, not athletes, so this poll sits closer to the school-sports end of New Mexico's public-vote landscape.

The nominees themselves come from the schools around Las Cruces: the published slate named wrestlers and basketball players from Las Cruces, Organ Mountain, Mayfield, Centennial and Gadsden programs. The nominees are high school athletes, so this page describes the field by school, sport and gender rather than by name, and readers who want the current list should open the live ballot, which carries each week's names, sports and photos.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the window falls

Confirmed editions of this ballot exist for 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026, a run long enough to mark the award as a recurring feature of the Las Cruces sports calendar rather than a one-season experiment. The years show the poll appearing across multiple school years, and the Sun-News describes it in the present tense as a weekly feature, nominating several athletes every week for the honor.

The timing evidence tied to this page's URL comes from a published edition covering Feb. 16-21, which the platform now labels closed. Separately, the Sun-News reported that a later poll in the series closes at noon on Friday, Sept. 18. Together those dates show the shape of the series: each weekly ballot carries its own short window, typically spanning a few days from nomination to close, and an expired poll freezes into a results page.

What the organizer has not printed anywhere is the schedule of upcoming polls; readers who want the next week's open and close dates should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The nomination side is equally fluid, since each week's slate is assembled by the Sun-News sports desk from that week's performances, and no advance calendar of which sports appear in which weeks has been published.

For a supporter, the practical reading is straightforward. A Feb. 16-21 poll is finished history; a Sept. 18 close at noon means the ballot linked from the current article is the live one; and any week in between belongs to whatever poll the newspaper has most recently pushed live.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot today

The mechanic is the plainest in New Mexico's public-vote field. A supporter opens the current Crowdsignal ballot, sees the week's nominee list, and clicks the radio button beside the athlete they want to honor. A press of the vote button at the foot of the form logs the choice, and Crowdsignal confirms it on screen. There is no login, no registration and no fee attached to the ballot itself.

The Sun-News goes further than most publishers on the repeat-vote question. Its published guidance states there are no limitations on voting, so readers may participate freely and often while a poll is open. That is the organizer's own stated rule, printed alongside the weekly nomination article, and it means a supporter can return to the ballot repeatedly through the window without breaking any printed rule of the award.

The weekly slate is sizable. The newspaper reported fifteen candidates drawn from basketball and wrestling, representing Las Cruces, Mayfield, Organ Mountain and Centennial. Every nominee carries a school and a sport alongside the name, so a supporter scanning the ballot can find a wrestler from one campus or a basketball player from another without guessing.

Timing matters more than technique on this ballot. Because each poll closes on its own schedule, and the voting URL always points at the newest edition in the series, a supporter who lands on a closed form should follow the Sun-News coverage to the current week's article and its fresh poll link. Anyone weighing outside support can read how to get more votes online, and questions about the legality of paid support are covered on the legality page.

How this ballot sits beside its New Mexico neighbours

Las Cruces is a distinct market within New Mexico's public-vote map. Most of the state's best-known ballots answer to Albuquerque or Santa Fe: the Albuquerque Journal Readers' Choice program, the Best of Santa Fe awards and the Best of Taos ballot all serve northern markets, while the New Mexico High School Football Star of the Week and the Top-Performing High School Baseball Hitters polls cover school sport statewide. This award is the one ballot in the set that belongs to the Las Cruces sports desk and its readers.

Its closest structural cousin is the KRQE Mesa Tractor Athlete of the Week, since both honor individual high school athletes on a weekly rhythm. The differences are in ownership and reach. KRQE is a television station with a statewide audience and a corporate sponsor in Mesa Tractor; this poll belongs to the Sun-News, carries a children's hospital as its sponsor, and draws its nominees from a tight cluster of schools: Las Cruces, Organ Mountain, Mayfield, Centennial and Gadsden.

The voting rules also diverge. Where many reader polls restrict repeat ballots, the Sun-News prints that there are no limitations on voting, an unusually open stance that shapes how supporters campaign for a nominee. And where best-of ballots run on annual cycles with long category lists, this award runs on a weekly cycle with a short, rotating athlete slate.

For a nominee's family or a school's supporters, the practical consequence is that effort concentrates into a window of days, not weeks, and that the same ballot address serves the whole season as each poll replaces the last.