Ashland Times-Gazette Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A city newspaper's ballot among Ohio's athlete of the week polls

Ohio readers have no shortage of athlete of the week ballots. The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Columbus Dispatch and the Dayton Daily News each run one for their own metro areas, and Fox 8 runs a player of the year vote for northeast Ohio football. The Ashland Times-Gazette Athlete of the Week is the small-market entry in that group: a single-city newspaper's poll, aimed at the high school athletes of Ashland and the paper's own coverage area, rather than a statewide or big-metro field.

The Ashland Times-Gazette is an Ohio newspaper, and the athlete of the week program is its reader-vote franchise for school sports. Every week during the season the paper posts a short list of nominees whose performances it has covered, and readers pick the winner. The paper publishes the vote on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm domain carries each weekly ballot, the same platform behind many newsroom polls, and the live ballot for the current week sits at poll.fm/16902835.

Three things set this ballot apart from its better-known siblings. First, the market is Ashland, not Akron, Columbus or Cincinnati, so the nominee pool is smaller and a handful of motivated supporters can genuinely swing a result. Second, the paper runs the poll weekly rather than as a single season-long event, which means the competitive window is measured in days, not months. Third, the newspaper writes its own instructions on each ballot, and those instructions, not a platform-wide policy, are what govern how the Ashland vote works.

Editions, seasons and the current voting window

The series has confirmed editions in 2024, 2025 and 2026, and the newspaper's sports desk dates each weekly ballot within those years. Across the 2024 to 2026 span the ballots cluster between September and June, which matches a school-year sports calendar: fall sports open the polling season, winter and spring sports carry it through, and the poll goes quiet over the summer. A 2027 cycle would follow if the pattern holds.

Each weekly ballot carries its own deadline rather than a single season-long close. One ballot the paper promoted in late August 2026 instructed readers to cast votes until 5 p.m. on Friday, September 4th, when the polls close. That is the most recent close time attached to this program, and it shows the shape of a weekly window: a few days of open voting ending in a Friday afternoon cutoff.

What the newspaper has not printed anywhere alongside the ballot is the roster of sports or performance categories its weekly nominations draw from; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The nominee list changes from week to week with the sports in season, so the names a reader sees in September are not the names a reader sees in April.

How a supporter votes this week

Voting is a plain public vote with no entry step. A supporter loads the current Ashland ballot at poll.fm/16902835, reads the short write-up the Times-Gazette sports desk has given each nominee, clicks the radio button beside a name and submits. The paper's printed instruction on the August 2026 ballot was to cast a vote "as often as you'd like" until the poll closes, so the Ashland ballot places no stated ceiling on repeat voting during the open window.

That instruction matters for anyone organizing support. Because the Times-Gazette invites repeat votes, a supporter who wants to help an athlete can return to the ballot day after day while the week's poll is live, and can ask teammates, classmates and family to do the same. There is no nomination form to file and no separate registration round; the nominee list is assembled by the newspaper, and the reader's only job is to choose among the names already posted.

The practical sequence is short: open the ballot, read the nominee notes, pick one, vote, and come back as often as the paper's own wording allows before the deadline. Because the deadline lands on a weekday afternoon, a vote cast late in the week leaves little time for a rival's supporters to answer it, which is why the final morning matters in a close Ashland race.

Where this ballot sits among Ohio's other athlete votes

The Ashland poll is one of six Ohio athlete-vote programs covered here, and what separates them is publisher and market. The Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week belong to big-metro newsrooms, the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week serves the state's largest single metro from its southwest corner, and the two Dayton entries, the Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week, split one metro between a general ballot and a football-only one. Fox 8's FNTD Player of the Year Vote is the outlier: a television station's season-culminating vote rather than a weekly newspaper poll.

Against that field, the Times-Gazette ballot is the neighborhood version. Its nominee pool comes from the paper's own coverage of Ashland-area schools, its weekly rhythm means a new race starts every few days, and its audience is the paper's local readership rather than a metro-wide one. For a supporter, that changes the arithmetic of a campaign: fewer total voters are involved, so a disciplined group of repeat voters moves the needle faster here than it would on a Columbus or Cincinnati ballot, where both the nominee pool and the electorate are much larger.

Building support inside the Times-Gazette's rules

Support in this program is built on repetition, because the newspaper's own wording invites votes as often as a supporter likes until the poll closes. A weekly Ashland ballot is live for only a few days, so the useful moves are the quick ones: pass the poll.fm address for the Ashland ballot to teammates and family on the first day, remind them once midweek, and make a final push the last morning before the afternoon cutoff. The Times-Gazette has printed no rule against coordinated voting, but it also prints the deadline on every ballot, and a vote submitted after the close counts for nothing. For broader tactics that work on weekly newsroom polls like this one, see our votes guide, and for the rules question see whether buying votes is legal.