Ashland Times-Gazette Female Track Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Ashland Times-Gazette Female Track Athlete of the Year is

The Ashland Times-Gazette Female Track Athlete of the Year lets readers choose the standout female high school track athlete in the paper's Ohio coverage area through a free public vote. The organizer is the Ashland Times-Gazette, a newspaper whose masthead gives the program its name, and the balloting itself runs on Crowdsignal at poll.fm, the polling host that serves many publisher-run athlete votes.

The ballot is a single-question public vote. The 2025 edition, titled the 2025 Ashland Times-Gazette Female Track Athlete of the Year, listed nominees by name alongside their school communities: Ashland, Black River, Loudonville, Hillsdale, New London and South Central. Those six communities anchor the program's market in and around Ashland, Ohio, and every nominee school on the 2025 ballot sits in Ohio.

Here are the program's fixed facts, gathered for quick reference.

Because the organizer is a local newspaper rather than a national broadcaster, the program's reach matches the paper's circulation area rather than a statewide audience. That makes it a small-market ballot in the same family as other Ohio publisher votes, and it explains why the nominee list changes with each track season while the host and the mechanic stay the same.

Dated facts behind the Ashland track award

This program has two confirmed edition years, 2022 and 2025, a spread wide enough that the award counts as annual instead of a single-season poll. The 2025 cycle is the most recent. Its ballot carries the title 2025 Ashland Times-Gazette Female Track Athlete of the Year and is marked Poll Closed, so that vote has ended and its standings are final.

The voting window falls between September and November. The paper does not print the opening or closing day for any edition, and no nomination-round schedule appears either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. What the finished 2025 poll does publish is the outcome: the leading nominee finished at 52 percent with 56,149 votes, and the runner-up held 47 percent. Those two figures are the only published numbers attached to this program, and they come straight from the closed poll's results display.

Several other facts sit outside the published page. The Ashland Times-Gazette has not printed a category roster for the ballot, a per-supporter vote limit, an eligibility rule, or platform round dates beyond the September to November span. None of those gaps is unusual for a small-market newspaper poll, but each one matters to a supporter planning a push, because the rules that govern a ballot are only ever the ones the organizer actually states. For this award, the published facts amount to the edition years, the window months, the host, and the 2025 result.

How a supporter votes in the Ashland Times-Gazette track poll

The mechanic is deliberately plain. Voting takes place at https://poll.fm/15615040, where the page shows the female track nominees with their school communities; the supporter selects one and submits. Crowdsignal logs the pick at once and the results view updates to match. There is no payment step, no nomination form for supporters to fill in, and no published login requirement anywhere on the ballot page the paper runs.

What the ballot does not publish is just as relevant to anyone planning a push. The Ashland Times-Gazette has not stated how often one supporter may vote, whether the poll accepts repeat visits from the same browser, or whether any verification applies to the tally. The paper has also not printed a category list, so the award runs as a single question rather than a multi-category ballot as far as its published page shows.

Timing follows the same pattern. The window sits between September and November, but the ballot itself never shows a countdown or a closing date, so a supporter arriving mid-season cannot tell from the page alone how much time remains. The practical habit is to check the poll.fm address directly at the start of the track award season and again before casting, since the live form is where any schedule or rule change for Ashland's award would first surface. Once the poll closes, the same address becomes the results page, as it did for the finished 2025 edition.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Ashland's track award belongs to a wider family of Ohio public-vote programs, and the differences between them are mostly about scale and rhythm. The Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week and the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week run on weekly cycles for big metro audiences, while the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week serves the state capital's readership. The Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week cover the Dayton market, and the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote brings a television station into the mix.

Ashland's program differs from all of those in three ways. First, it is a year-end award rather than a weekly series, so a supporter gets one sustained window between September and November instead of a fresh ballot every few days. Second, it is female-only and track-only, where most siblings rotate across sports and genders. Third, its market is a single small city and its surrounding school communities, Ashland, Loudonville, Hillsdale, New London, Black River and South Central, rather than a metro area, which is why the 2025 result could turn on 56,149 votes concentrated in a handful of towns.

For a supporter, that scale cuts both ways: a smaller electorate makes each personal appeal count for more, and the same concentration makes the published result more sensitive to how hard each school community pushes.

Strengthening support in a small-market newspaper poll

Because this ballot is a single Crowdsignal question with a September to November window, effective support looks like concentrated local outreach rather than a long grind. The 2025 result, decided at 52 percent to 47 percent, shows the margin a determined school community can close. Share the poll.fm address directly with Ashland-area track families, ask for one visit each, and repeat the ask while the window is open, since the paper publishes no daily-return rule either way.

The Ashland Times-Gazette has not printed any statement about outside help for this award, so the only published constraint is the ballot itself. Whatever a supporter does, the honest baseline is that no vendor, ours included, promises a winning result in a counted public vote, and the paper's silence on purchased votes is not the same as permission. Read the organizer's rules first, then decide. Our award votes page explains how support for award-style ballots is generally approached, and the live ballot remains the final authority each cycle.