MaxPreps Ohio Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Ohio "Athlete of the Week" polls exist. Most searchers land on the wrong one.

MaxPreps and High School on SI both run statewide, multi-sport Ohio fan polls under nearly the same name, and they share nothing. Different organiser, different URL, different finalist pool. SI (formerly SBLive) builds its Ohio ballot at si.com off editorial coverage. MaxPreps builds its own at maxpreps.com from stats and box scores submitted directly through its platform, the same tool thousands of Ohio programs already use to log results. So a nominee can headline the MaxPreps ballot one week and never appear on SI's, and vice versa. Neither organisation checks the other's list first.

That split matters practically. A coach or stat-keeper who wants a performance considered needs to know which pipeline actually feeds which ballot. Posting a great box score to MaxPreps does nothing for the SI nomination process, and being covered by a local SI reporter does nothing for the MaxPreps algorithm-adjacent selection. This page covers the MaxPreps ballot specifically; the separate SBLive / High School on SI Ohio Athlete of the Week ballot runs its own process entirely. Ohio also runs other statewide high school fan votes worth checking if your program's sport or region isn't showing up here.

What we actually know about the finalist pool (and what MaxPreps doesn't publish)

Here's the gap worth naming upfront: MaxPreps does not publish raw vote totals, a public submission queue, or selection criteria beyond "stats submitted through the platform." There's no leaderboard of near-misses, no published threshold. What's confirmed is the shape of the rotation. Football, boys and girls soccer, and volleyball share the fall ballot. Basketball, both genders, and ice hockey take over by winter. That's the entire in-season OHSAA calendar cycling through one statewide vote.

One week's finalist list might pair a football running back from a small county against a volleyball hitter from a major metro program: same ballot, unrelated sports, unrelated regions. That's not a quirk. It's the whole design. MaxPreps pulls whatever stats got logged and selected that week, sport-agnostic. A program tracking a related honor can compare notes with the Ohio football player of the week ballot, a separate fan vote covered on this site, or the longer-arc Ohio Player of the Year conversation.

The six-day window changes what actually works

Tuesday to noon Monday is nearly six days of open voting. Compare that to the 24-to-48-hour polls common elsewhere, and the math changes completely. A campaign that peaks on release day and goes quiet by Thursday has wasted most of the window. The ones that hold position resurface the link two or three times before Monday, not once.

Sunday evening, not Monday morning, is the real inflection point. Noon Monday lands mid-morning for most people already juggling school or work, so by the time someone remembers to vote, the poll may already be closed. A reminder sent Sunday night catches people while they're still scrolling and still have time. Whether the organiser allows repeat voting that week is a live-ballot question, not a fixed rule; it has shifted before, so check current terms rather than what applied last month, and see this breakdown of what's actually allowed on fan-vote contests before assuming any tactic is safe. For general timing patterns across week-long fan polls, see this fan-vote guide.

Eight metro areas, one ballot: geography doesn't gate who shows up

Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus), Hamilton (Cincinnati), Montgomery (Dayton), Summit (Akron), Lucas (Toledo), Mahoning (Youngstown), Stark (Canton). All eight feed the same statewide list, and none gets a reserved slot. Whether a program shows up in a given week depends on whether its stats reached MaxPreps and got selected, not on market size or media footprint.

So a program from a smaller county can end up next to a finalist from one of Ohio's largest metros, and that's just how a stat-driven, submission-based ballot behaves. It doesn't rank by audience. Supporters trying to help a nominated performance win are better off reaching people with an actual connection to the program: team families, classmates, alumni networks that already talk to each other, rather than a broad public push. Fan-poll vote support is built for exactly this kind of multi-day voting window; check current package pricing before committing to a plan. See our guide to earning votes for an online contest for the organic side of the campaign, and browse the full state-by-state fan vote directory for similar weekly ballots nationwide.