WETM MyTwinTiers Athlete of the Week (Twin Tiers): How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing that trips up first-time voters

Old posts don't disappear. That's the trap. MyTwinTiers.com publishes a fresh Athlete of the Week ballot every week of the school year, but last week's post (and the one before it, and the one before that) stays live on the site indefinitely, poll widget still sitting there looking perfectly votable. Land on the wrong one from a shared link or a stale search result, and you're voting into a closed poll that will never count. Check the publication date first. That's the whole trick.

WETM-TV 18 and MyTwinTiers.com, both under Nexstar Media Group, run this as a straightforward broadcast fan-vote: a sports desk pick, an embedded widget, no login wall. Simmons-Rockwell Nissan's name rides alongside it as presenting sponsor. What makes it worth documenting isn't scale, it's confirmed persistence. January, April, and May editions across both 2024 and 2025 all verified as live, which tells you this isn't a one-off promotion the station tried and dropped. It's a running weekly fixture, quietly drawing an estimated 10,000 votes a year across a three-county footprint with no single school big enough to dominate it. For the mechanics that show up across most of these station-run ballots, see how online fan votes work.

A ballot with no hometown favorite

Twin Tiers is a border term, really: it straddles the New York Southern Tier and the top edge of Pennsylvania. MyTwinTiers.com's actual footprint for this poll centers on three New York counties: Chemung (Elmira, Horseheads), Steuben (Corning), and Schuyler (Watkins Glen, Odessa-Montour), with Waverly's district in Tioga County pulled in as a neighbor. Elmira City and Horseheads Central are the two largest enrollments in that footprint. Neither has an obvious lock on the weekly nomination.

That matters for how a week actually plays out. Because the sports desk can pull its pick from any school in a multi-county area, not a single conference or a single city, the competitive shape resets every week depending on which district's storyline the station decided to run. A Watkins Glen nominee one week faces a completely different mobilization math than a Corning-Painted Post nominee the next, simply because of how many households each district's network can realistically reach in a few days. There's no default frontrunner here the way a single-city poll might have one. Two adjacent programs worth comparing against are the New York High School Athlete of the Week and the New York High School Football Player of the Week, both of which draw statewide rather than from this specific three-county pocket.

What the organizer won't tell you (and why that's normal)

No published vote cap. No published close-time rule that holds across every week. That's not an oversight, it's just how WETM-TV 18 runs this particular format. The per-visitor limit, if any, and the exact hour the ballot closes are set on that week's live page, not carved into a permanent terms document somewhere on the site. So the live post is the only source of truth, every single week, and treating an old screenshot or a friend's recollection as gospel is how people miss the actual deadline.

This is also not the only Athlete of the Week-style program touching the Twin Tiers, and it helps to know which is which. A separate print or Gannett-affiliated editorial column could theoretically cover overlapping ground with its own selection process; the MyTwinTiers ballot is unrelated to that, a broadcast-station product with its own nomination and voting flow. And it has zero bearing on Section IV of NYSPHSAA, which runs the actual playoff seeding and championships for Southern Tier high school athletics. Winning a Friday-night fan poll changes nothing about a team's postseason standing. Two entirely separate systems, both real, neither one substituting for the other.

Running a campaign across three counties, not one gym

A single-school poll campaign is simple: text the team group chat, post in the booster page, done. A three-county ballot is different, because the people who'd actually vote for a Watkins Glen nominee are scattered across Schuyler County, maybe a chunk of family in Corning, maybe alumni who moved to Elmira for work. The campaigns that do well here lean on whatever network already exists around that specific school (team parent group chats, the district's own social pages, a coach or athletic director willing to share the post) rather than trying to blanket the whole Twin Tiers region cold. The general playbook in getting votes for an online contest and getting people to vote for you applies here too, scaled down to a three-county radius instead of a national audience.

Speed matters more than volume in a poll this size. A message that names the athlete, the school, the county, and links straight to the current week's mytwintiers.com/sports post gives someone everything they need to vote in under a minute, no searching, no guessing which post is live. Because that close time isn't fixed, the smart move is a reminder push a day before the window is expected to end, not a single blast at the start of the week. For paid support that fits this kind of short, time-boxed community push, the fan poll vote packages catalog covers station-run ballots on a similar weekly cadence, and real, verifiable vote support plus the legal basics of buying votes are worth understanding before running any paid push against a public poll. Other Twin Tiers-adjacent programs are listed on the New York fan-vote hub and the full state-by-state directory.