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

What the Athlete of the Week ballot is and who runs it

This Athlete of the Week honor is decided entirely by readers of the Poughkeepsie Journal, a newspaper publisher based in Poughkeepsie, New York, whose site is poughkeepsiejournal.com. The paper invites its audience to pick a standout high school athlete each week during the school-year sports calendar, and there is no entry fee for a supporter and no judging panel anywhere in the process.

Balloting runs through the Crowdsignal survey service at poll.fm, and the series currently lives at poll.fm/14607985. The format is deliberately simple. Each new poll lists the week's nominees by name, school and sport, readers select a choice and submit, and the tally is displayed as percentages when the poll closes.

Since the poll lists minors by name, this reference describes the program without repeating nominee names and sticks to the structure the Journal publishes. Sport is the vertical here, public voting is the mechanic, and the program sits beside several other New York high school athlete polls covered in the pages linked further down.

The dated record for this series

Confirmed editions of the series run in 2022, 2023 and 2024, established through ballots on the poll.fm platform whose dates calibrate to those three seasons. That makes the Athlete of the Week a recurring feature rather than a single-year experiment, even though the program name stays constant from season to season.

The documented ballot months stretch across the school year: October, November and December in the fall, then April and May in the spring. The most recently dated window in the series is April 27-May 3, identified as the voting period for the next week's athlete, and the poll carrying that window has since closed, with the cycle's end date set at May 3, 2026.

Because each window covers a week of games, a fresh poll replaces the previous poll as that stretch of the schedule ends, which is why the series URL always points at the latest ballot rather than a fixed annual page.

The Journal does not print a per-supporter vote ceiling or nominee eligibility rules beside the poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No next edition year has been announced by the paper either, so the return of the series beyond the seasons already documented is a matter for the Journal's own sports pages to settle when a new poll posts.

How a supporter votes this week

Voting takes four steps in practice. A supporter opens the series page at poll.fm/14607985, which always carries the latest poll in the series, reads the nominee list with each athlete's school and sport beside the name, picks the radio button beside the intended choice and clicks the voting button underneath the choices. Crowdsignal then confirms the vote, and when the poll closes the final tally appears as percentages beside each nominee on the same page.

Supply happens before any of that. 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, and the nominations are compiled from the information the Journal collects during the week itself. The ballot shows no write-in box, so a vote can only go to a published nominee for that week.

Timing matters because the slate turns over weekly. A vote meant for this week's athletes has no effect on next week's poll, and a link shared after a poll closes reaches a page that only displays the finished percentages. The practical habit for supporters is to vote early in the window, after the coaches have supplied the week's nominee list, and to pass along the live URL rather than an older address saved from a previous week's ballot.

Where this ballot sits among its New York neighbours

The Poughkeepsie Journal's poll is a local-market entry in a wider family of New York high school athlete ballots. Nearby programs on this site include the Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week in Buffalo, the Hudson Valley New York High School Football Player of the Week, and the paired lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week and Lohud Girls Basketball Player of the Week.

Statewide football ballots 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 distinguishes the Poughkeepsie Journal's entry is its shape: it is a general athlete of the week honor rather than a single-sport or single-gender ballot, it rotates its nominee slate every week across the school-year sports calendar, and it is anchored to a specific newspaper's coverage rather than to a statewide or sectional footprint. A supporter deciding where to concentrate effort should match the ballot to the athlete's actual sport and school, since a vote cast on the wrong program's poll contributes nothing toward the Journal's weekly result.

Strengthening support within this ballot's rules

This poll rewards speed and reach more than anything else. The window covers a single week of games, the slate changes every poll, and the final tally is a plain percentage count, so support that arrives early and from the school community itself is what moves the number. Practical moves for this specific ballot: put the live poll.fm URL in front of the school's networks the day the new slate posts, ask the school's own channels to pass it on while the window is open, and remind supporters that casting a ballot is free and needs no account.

The Journal prints no rules text about outside help beside the poll, so the on-screen instructions on each ballot are the guidance to follow. Anything that looks like an offer to fill a poll with paid votes should be weighed against the organizer's terms before spending money, since every outside service, including anything sold through this site, faces the same open outcome a public vote produces. The tactics that suit week-long school polls are laid out at get more votes online.