Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What WXLV ABC 45 Greensboro actually confirms about this ballot

WXLV ABC 45 Greensboro, a Sinclair-owned ABC affiliate serving the Piedmont Triad, runs Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week out of its own Friday Night Rivals sports coverage at abc45.com. The current cycle's nomination page carries sponsor branding from Tatum & Atkinson, described on the same page as a North Carolina personal injury law firm, and the confirmed window runs from August through December 2026.

Past that window, the page goes quiet on specifics. No ballot category list is printed, no per-voter cap or one-per-day rule appears anywhere, and a separate voting-phase schedule is not yet published. That is worth stating plainly rather than filling in with a guess borrowed from a similar-sounding ballot elsewhere.

Two cycles is the entire confirmed run so far. A school or family weighing a nomination is looking at a program still building its own annual pattern, not one with a decade of past winners to compare against.

August through December: the only dates this cycle actually publishes

The nomination window's boundaries, August through December 2026, are the single most solid dated fact on the current abc45.com page. That stretch runs longer than a typical single-round ballot, closer to a season-long nomination call than a two-week voting sprint, which fits a segment built around Friday Night Rivals high-school sports coverage running through the fall.

2025 is the program's first confirmed cycle and 2026 its second; nothing published traces the format back further than that. A voting phase, separate from nominating, is common on comparable Sinclair-station ballots once a nomination window this long finally closes, but abc45.com has not printed that stage's dates for the current cycle. A two-cycle-old program has not yet settled into one fixed shape, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

WXLV ABC 45's station address prints as 3500 Myer Lee Drive, Winston-Salem, giving a sense of where the broadcast and its web operation are physically based, even though the recognition itself covers the wider Piedmont Triad rather than Winston-Salem alone.

One Sinclair station, six athlete-of-the-week ballots across North Carolina

North Carolina runs several separate weekly athletics recognition ballots, and none of them share a judging panel or a results page with WXLV ABC 45's own Piedmont Triad program.

A Piedmont Triad athlete who wins a spot on WXLV ABC 45's own ballot has won nothing toward any of the programs above, and the reverse holds too. Sharing a metro with a different newsroom's own weekly poll does not mean sharing a nomination form, a results page or a single vote total; each of these ballots is a fully separate contest with a separate address.

Backing a nominee inside a window this new

With only two confirmed cycles behind it, this ballot does not hand a school or a family a long run of past winners to study. The realistic move is to line up who will actually visit abc45.com during the confirmed August-through-December window and ask them again more than once, rather than waiting on a longer history that is not there yet.

That advice holds regardless of whatever the voting stage eventually looks like, capped, uncapped, or never spelled out beyond nominating. Real supporters, asked directly and more than once, are what moves a ballot like this one. A newer program is also exactly the kind of ballot where a burst of irregular activity draws attention fastest, since Sinclair stations watch every market they run for exactly that pattern; a flag on only a program's second cycle costs more than the same flag would on a decade-old ballot.

Is buying votes legal lays out where a legitimate supporter push ends and a risky one begins, worth reading before spending real effort chasing this program's third cycle. Buying votes online walks through what outside support for a nominate-then-vote format like this one typically looks like, and sports fan poll vote support is built specifically around a school-sports recognition ballot shaped the way this one is.