The Poughkeepsie Journal Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Poughkeepsie Journal Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

The Athlete of the Week feature from the Poughkeepsie Journal is a weekly high school sports recognition poll published by the Poughkeepsie Journal, the daily newspaper based in Poughkeepsie, New York. Each ballot asks readers a single question, who deserves the week's recognition, and answers it with a slate of nominees drawn from the newspaper's coverage of high school sports in its market. Slates pair each nominee with a school and a sport, and the schools that have appeared on listed ballots include Beacon, New Paltz, Red Hook, Spackenkill, Dover and Lourdes.

Crowdsignal at poll.fm carries the vote, the same balloting platform that hosts a cluster of other New York high school polls covered on this site. The format is a plain public vote, with no panel, no judges and no editorial override. Whoever holds the most clicks when the poll closes wins the week, and the page displays the resulting percentages once voting has ended.

Facts at a glance

For a nominating business, a coach or a family, the practical shape of the program matters more than its branding. This is a short-window, high-frequency ballot: a nominee's entire campaign lives and dies inside a few days, and the audience is the paper's local readership plus whoever the school community can rally to the link.

The dated record for the Poughkeepsie Journal Athlete of the Week

Three seasons of the Poughkeepsie Journal Athlete of the Week are confirmed: 2022, 2023 and 2024, established from a series of 10 ballots on poll.fm dated between April 2022 and November 2024. That span makes the program an annual fixture of the paper's sports coverage rather than a single experiment, and it qualifies the series as recurring on this site's standard of two or more confirmed edition years.

The voting calendar follows the school year. Ballots in the series run October through May, which matches the months when high school sports in the Poughkeepsie Journal's coverage area are actually being played. The most recent ballot listed in the series closed on May 3, 2026, covering the April 27 to May 3 week, and the paper's own announcement for that week read: "The Poughkeepsie Journal has now opened the nominations for the Athlete of the Week April 27-May 3."

What the paper has not published is the fine print a supporter or a nominating coach most wants: the Poughkeepsie Journal prints neither a supporter-level vote ceiling nor any eligibility wording, and no start date for the next season's first ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That gap is the single most important thing to understand about this program's calendar. The rhythm is predictable, a fresh poll each week while school is in session, but the precise day a new ballot posts and the day it closes belong to the paper's weekly publishing schedule, not to any standing announcement.

How a supporter votes on the Poughkeepsie Journal Athlete of the Week ballot

The Poughkeepsie Journal's ballot asks very little of the people who back it. A supporter opens the current poll at poll.fm/14607985, reads the slate of nominees, each shown as a school and sport pairing, clicks the radio option beside a choice, and submits. No essay, no fee and no published registration step sits between the click and the count. Once the ballot closes, the page shows the final percentages: on the most recent listed poll, the leading nominee held 55 percent of the vote and the runner-up 31 percent, a margin that shows how quickly a well-organized school community can pull away from the field in a weekly format.

Getting onto the ballot is a separate process from voting, and it runs through the paper's sports desk rather than through the poll page. Nominations are compiled from the information the Poughkeepsie Journal collects during the week, and coaches are encouraged to send game details and player statistics to [email protected] by the end of the week for their athletes to be considered. That email deadline is the only published nomination route, so a coach who misses the week's cutoff waits for the next ballot.

Because the slate rotates every week, a supporter should always check that the name and school they intend to back actually appear on the current poll before sharing the link. A week-old URL can point at a poll that has already closed, and closed polls on poll.fm display results rather than accept clicks.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

Among the New York high school sports polls on this site, the Poughkeepsie Journal's Athlete of the Week holds a distinct place, and the differences between it and its neighbours are mostly about scope and sport. The Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week runs a girls-only format for the Buffalo market. The Hudson Valley New York High School Football Player of the Week narrows to a single sport in the region just south of the Poughkeepsie Journal's home turf.

The lohud pair splits by gender across basketball season: the lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the Lohud Girls Basketball Player of the Week each run their own ballot. Two broader programs round out the set, the New York High School Football Player of the Week and the New York Section 1 High School Football Player of the Week.

What makes the Poughkeepsie Journal's version distinct is its breadth within a single newspaper's coverage: it spans boys and girls sports across the whole school year, from fall football and girls soccer through cross country and volleyball, rather than concentrating on one sport or one season. Its school communities, including Beacon, New Paltz, Red Hook, Spackenkill, Dover and Lourdes, give it a distinctly local character that the statewide football ballots do not replicate.

Strengthening support in a weekly poll like this one

A weekly ballot rewards the first 48 hours. The Poughkeepsie Journal's poll opens, runs for a few days and closes, so a campaign that waits for the weekend has already surrendered most of the window. The practical playbook for this program is to get the poll link into team group chats, parent networks and the accounts the school itself runs on the day the ballot posts, and to give supporters a specific nominee to click rather than a generic request to vote.

The paper publishes no stated policy on voting software, automated clicks or outside help, and no per-supporter limit appears on the ballot itself. Because nothing is printed either way, an organized push is neither forbidden nor protected by any published Poughkeepsie Journal rule, and a campaign that looks padded with irregular activity carries a risk the paper has never described in print.

For a fuller rundown of tactics that fit a short-window public vote, see how to get more votes online, and for the position on purchased packages for award-style ballots, see buying award votes. Both pages stay within what an organizer's rules actually say rather than promising outcomes no organizer has endorsed.