WWNY Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A market this size doesn't usually run its own weekly vote

Watertown isn't a big television market. It's one of the smaller ones Nexstar operates in New York, well behind Syracuse, Binghamton, or Elmira in population reach. And yet WWNY-TV 7 keeps a standing, dedicated Athlete of the Week page running at wwnytv.com/sports/athlete/, pulling nominees from Jefferson, St. Lawrence, and Lewis counties every week the sports calendar allows it. That's the structural fact worth sitting with before anything else: a station covering a comparatively small North Country audience sustains the same weekly-vote format that bigger downstate and central New York markets run, without folding it into a larger regional page.

Here's the part that's easy to miss on a first visit. WWNY doesn't publish a new article each week the way a typical sports desk does, no dated headline, no fresh URL to bookmark. The ballot lives on one fixed page, and the station simply swaps in whichever athlete is current. Come back next week expecting an archive of the last winner and you won't find one. That single detail changes how a supporter should actually use this page: check it directly, don't search for "this week's" anything.

The bigger gap is vote totals. Nothing on the current page shows a running count, a final tally, or a margin for any past cycle. Compare that to a station that posts "and the winner is, with X votes" after each close; WWNY's page simply doesn't do that. Whether that's a deliberate choice or just a lighter production budget for a smaller market isn't something the public page answers, so it gets named here rather than guessed at. For the general mechanics behind pacing a real, human-turnout campaign on a ballot like this, see the online vote-buying guide.

Three counties, one ballot, no visible pattern

Jefferson, St. Lawrence, and Lewis counties make up the pool WWNY draws from, and there's no announced rotation telling a viewer which county's school comes up next. A Watertown City School District athlete can headline one week; a program from a small Lewis County town can follow it the next, with nothing on the page hinting at what's coming. That's a meaningfully different shape than a single-district poll, where the same handful of schools compete against each other every cycle and a supporter can track patterns over a season.

What that means in practice: a smaller-enrollment North Country school isn't at a structural disadvantage here the way it might be in, say, a statewide poll dominated by downstate metro programs with far larger social followings. The nominee pool itself is already regional and modest in scale, so the gap between a Watertown-area school and a rural Lewis County one is narrower than the gap you'd see comparing a New York City borough school against a small upstate town on a bigger ballot. Section III, which governs actual postseason eligibility and seeding for programs across this part of the state, has nothing to do with any of it, a WWNY win or loss changes zero about a team's real standing.

Sister Nexstar stations run the same weekly format elsewhere in New York. New York's contest hub tracks how the WBNG Binghamton and WETM Elmira/Twin Tiers versions of this format compare, and the state's broader athlete-of-the-week program sits at New York High School Athlete of the Week, run by a different, SI-affiliated organizer entirely. WWNY's version is the only one of the three built around a fixed, evergreen page rather than a fresh weekly post, and the only one showing no public vote count at all.

What a real push looks like against a ballot with no visible scoreboard

No cap, no running tally, no confirmed close time, just the organizer's standing rule against automated or scripted voting and a new nominee eventually replacing the current one. That combination cuts two ways for anyone trying to help a North Country athlete. On one hand, there's no official ceiling capping a real, human-driven turnout push. On the other, nobody outside WWNY's newsroom can confirm from the page alone how much movement is actually needed, or whether a given week's race is close at all.

A three-county pool this size means the practical reach isn't enormous, school parent groups, a program's athletic social accounts, and word passed through a small-town sports community can plausibly cover the relevant audience without needing a huge coordinated effort. Fan poll voting support and sports fan-poll vote support exist for exactly this kind of open, turnout-driven ballot; check the live wwnytv.com page for its current rules before running anything, since WWNY controls the mechanics and can adjust them at any point without notice.

For how New York's other regional high school fan-vote programs stack up against this one, county by county and organizer by organizer, the full picture sits at the New York contest hub, part of the national USA contest directory.