Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one fact most WNY voters discover too late

Thursday noon. That is the close.

Not Thursday night. Not end of business. Noon Eastern, when most voters are at work, in class, or halfway through a school day. The Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week poll closes earlier in the day than any comparable high school fan-vote poll running in New York State, and it is the single operational fact that reshapes how every campaign here has to be planned. A supporter who shows up at 8 p.m. Thursday to vote will find a locked ballot with no recourse.

The lohud Westchester poll (the other well-known regional New York prep vote) closes Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. Prep Talk closes Thursday at noon. One extra calendar day, but the same midday wall. Wednesday evening is the last real campaigning window, full stop.

The second fact worth knowing upfront is scope. This is not a basketball poll or a track poll or a soccer poll. It is all of them at once. On any given week the field can span whatever sport Section VI NYSPHSAA and Monsignor Martin programs are competing in: basketball against swimming against lacrosse against cross country, depending on the season. A campaign that assumes it is the only sport represented on the ballot may be wrong.

What public data exists and what the paywall hides

The honest accounting matters here.

Confirmed from open sources: the poll runs year-round, closing Thursday at 12:00 p.m. Eastern; coaches nominate by emailing [email protected] by Sunday night; Sgroi Financial sponsors the award; weekly winners feed into the annual Girls Athlete of the Year spring recognition; the ballot covers Section VI across Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, and Cattaraugus counties plus Monsignor Martin programs; polls have run during basketball and swimming season in March, fall sports in September, and spring season closers in June.

Not verifiable from open data: the specific nominees from any individual week, the winning vote margins, which schools have appeared most frequently, and the precise language the Buffalo News uses to describe repeat-voting rules. The Buffalo News is a subscription publication. Prep Talk ballot articles sit behind that wall in a way that SI's Texas regional polls (open web, searchable, winner write-ups indexed for years) simply do not.

That absence of a public historical record is itself useful information. It means the Thursday noon window is more decisive here than in an open-web poll, because no outsider is tracking past margins and calibrating their effort against known benchmarks. A community that knows its own network and moves Wednesday evening does not need a published vote count to win.

Section VI and Monsignor Martin: the two communities on one ballot

Section VI is Western New York's NYSPHSAA division. Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, and Cattaraugus counties, anchored on the east by Buffalo and extending west to the Lake Erie shoreline and south toward the Pennsylvania border. One of eleven NYSPHSAA sections statewide. For the Prep Talk poll, it is the entire public-school geography.

Alongside Section VI, Monsignor Martin Catholic High School Athletic Association programs compete on the same ballot. Cardinal O'Hara Hawks, Mount St. Mary Academy, Nardin Academy, and Canisius Golden Griffins sit outside the NYSPHSAA structure entirely, but they are inside Prep Talk's scope. A Nardin athlete whose team never shares a court with a Section VI opponent during the regular season can still appear on the same Thursday ballot as a Williamsville North or Clarence nominee and win, because the fan vote is decided by reader turnout, not by enrollment tier or conference record.

That matters for how campaigns work. Monsignor Martin schools draw from tightly connected Catholic alumni and parish networks across the Buffalo Diocese. Those networks can route a message through one coordinated channel by Wednesday night. Larger Section VI public programs like Williamsville North or Orchard Park carry bigger absolute fan bases but more distributed ones; getting a link to move through a wide, loosely connected parent and alumni network before Thursday noon takes a different kind of push than reaching a centralized parish group. Neither has an inherent advantage. The one that reaches its people first does.

More Western New York prep sports context is at /usa/new-york/. The statewide New York athlete of the week poll, which draws from all eleven NYSPHSAA sections rather than Section VI alone, is covered at /usa/new-york-high-school-athlete-of-the-week/. The full national poll index lives at /usa/. For the how-to guide on running weekly fan-vote campaigns, see /how-to/.

Running a campaign before Thursday noon

Two things a Prep Talk Girls campaign has to get right: the nomination, and the network timing.

Nominations go to [email protected] by Sunday night. Include the athlete's name, school, sport, the full stat line (points, yards, saves, times, whatever the sport measures), the opponent, and the score. A standout performance that no coach reports to the newsroom by Sunday can be left off the ballot regardless of how impressive it was. The Sunday-night email is step one; everything else is downstream of it.

Once the ballot is live, the math is reach before Wednesday night. A campaign that waits until Thursday morning has a few hours before the noon close; one that moves Wednesday after school has a full evening of voting behind it before Thursday begins. For Monsignor Martin programs with active parish networks, Wednesday evening is when those chains are fastest. For larger Section VI public programs such as Williamsville North, Orchard Park, and Lancaster, the school's own social accounts and parent communication channels need to move the link before Wednesday night, because a lunchtime Thursday nudge does not leave enough time to recover lost ground.

Because the ballot is settled entirely by reader turnout, structured vote-support campaigns built for weekly fan polls exist for exactly this kind of contest, and the Thursday noon deadline makes timing especially consequential compared to polls that run through the weekend.