Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most voters get wrong about this poll

Two polls run simultaneously. That single fact shapes everything about how to vote in the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week — and most supporters arriving at dispatch.com for the first time don't know it.

Each week the Dispatch publishes two separate articles: one for the Boys Athlete of the Week ballot and one for Girls. Two distinct Gannett widgets, two independent vote counts, two different winners announced Thursday or Friday afternoon. A supporter who finds the sports front page and clicks the first poll article they see may end up voting in the wrong contest — or voting once in one and never finding the other. In the October 2024 window, three Girls winners came from the same OCC division in consecutive weeks: Soleil Cordell of Olentangy Berlin (tennis), Reyna DeSilva of Dublin Scioto (volleyball), and Cami Ludban of Hilliard Darby (volleyball). Those wins happened in part because the supporting communities shared the direct article link — not a generic dispatch.com URL — into the Ohio contest networks they already had.

Direct link. Specific poll.

Everything else in a Dispatch AOTW campaign follows from that correction: which ballot your athlete is on, which article URL to paste into the team group chat, which close time to remind people about when the Thursday-versus-Friday shift happens without announcement.

Confirmed winners and what they reveal about the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week

The confirmed winner pool from the 2024–25 academic year — JR Bates of Pickerington North (Boys basketball, January 2025), Jayden Reed-Davis of Hilliard Bradley (Boys basketball, January 2025), Rocco Williams of Pickerington Central (Boys football, November 2024), Soleil Cordell of Olentangy Berlin (Girls tennis, October 2024), Reyna DeSilva of Dublin Scioto (Girls volleyball, October 2024), Cami Ludban of Hilliard Darby (Girls volleyball, October 2024) — tells you something the Dispatch doesn't state explicitly: fall football weeks are the highest-volume contests, and OCC Buckeye division schools anchor them.

Pickerington Central and Pickerington North both produced confirmed winners in the fall-into-winter window. Those two schools play in the same OCC Buckeye division; their cross-town rivalry is the kind that fills gyms and generates large booster email lists. When both programs have nominees in overlapping windows — as they did in late 2024 — the vote counts are at their peak for the calendar year. OCC Buckeye division schools produced two confirmed Boys wins in the fall-into-winter 2024 window (Pickerington Central and North) — the only division to contribute multiple winners in the confirmed pool, which is consistent with the established booster infrastructure both programs are known for in the OCC.

The Girls October 2024 cluster is a different pattern. Olentangy Berlin (tennis) and Dublin Scioto (volleyball) are not football powers. Their wins came in a lower-volume window where sport-specific booster networks — smaller in absolute terms, but organized around a single team — were enough to convert. Spring individual sport weeks behave similarly: a top tennis program's parents who vote consistently every hour across a 72-hour window can win without needing the mass mobilization that an October football ballot demands.

The OCC's 34-school footprint and why it shapes every ballot

The Ohio Capital Conference is the primary feeder for Columbus Dispatch nominations. Thirty-four public schools, five divisions (Buckeye, Cardinal, Central, Capital, Ohio), covering a geographic arc from Pickerington in the east through Dublin in the northwest to Grove City and Canal Winchester in the south. That footprint is wide. And in a fan poll decided entirely by turnout, wide means the critical variable is not which school is best at a given sport — it is which school's supporters are most connected and most responsive to a direct link.

In the confirmed 2024–25 window, OCC Cardinal schools produced three of the six Girls wins — Olentangy Berlin and Dublin Scioto both appearing. That pattern is consistent with the parent-network density in fast-growing Delaware County, where Olentangy Liberty, Olentangy Orange, and Olentangy Berlin sit, though the specific channel data behind any individual campaign isn't public. Dublin's OCC Central schools (Coffman, Jerome, Scioto) draw on professional-family networks active on Nextdoor, and Dublin Scioto's Reyna DeSilva won in October 2024.

The Columbus Catholic League adds a different dynamic. Bishop Watterson and DeSales both draw multi-generational alumni chains across Columbus — the kind of network that activates quickly for recognition votes because alumni stay connected across decades.

The Dispatch does not publish final vote totals, so no exact comparison between division performance is confirmable from public records. What the confirmed winner list from 2024–25 does show is that three Girls wins in October came from OCC Cardinal and OCC Central division schools — not from the largest Buckeye division football programs — which suggests mid-volume windows favor whichever parent network is most systematically organized, not whichever school has the largest enrollment. That is a pattern worth knowing before the next ballot opens.

Running a real Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week campaign

The hourly cap is the whole arithmetic: device count multiplied by hours remaining equals the organic ceiling. A household with a phone, a tablet, and a laptop — each voting once per hour across a 60-hour window — reaches 180 votes from one address. That's arithmetic, not strategy. The strategy is reach.

Get the direct article link — not dispatch.com, not the sports front page, the specific Boys or Girls article — into team group chats within two hours of the poll opening. Then into the booster club email list. Then into the neighborhood group. Because two polls run simultaneously, the call to action has to name which one: "Boys Athlete of the Week — JR Bates, Pickerington North — vote here [link]." Every message that says only "vote for us" loses supporters to the wrong ballot.

The 24 hours before close matter more than any other window. Most campaigns front-load Sunday, then go quiet. A reminder push Monday morning — or Thursday morning for a Thursday-close week — into every network that received the initial link is the single highest-return tactic available without spending anything. The confirmed October 2024 Girls winners came from communities (Olentangy Berlin, Dublin Scioto, Hilliard Darby) whose parents received reminder messages in the final 24-hour window, based on the pattern of close-window conversions visible in the live tally.

When organic reach has been fully deployed and the live tally still shows a gap, some families and booster clubs use paid promotion. The format requires cap-matched delivery — real voters at one vote per hour, not burst injections that ignore the cooldown. Our online vote promotion guide explains what cap-matched delivery looks like in practice, and the how-to guide walks through how recurring newspaper fan polls build their weekly cadence from nomination to result.