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

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

This award is the Ashland paper's end-of-season honor for boys track, staged by the Ashland Times-Gazette, a newspaper whose name places it in Ashland, Ohio. The vertical is sport, and the format is a single honor rather than a multi-category ballot: a single poll, a single slate of nominees, and a winner decided by community support in a public-vote format.

The ballot is hosted on Crowdsignal, reached through poll.fm, and the voting link serves poll 15615023 under the title 2025 Ashland Times-Gazette Male Track Athlete of the Year (Poll Closed). That title dates the latest ballot to 2025 and flags that voting has ended, so the page displays final standings instead of an open form. Because the slate is made up of student athletes, the program is described here by publisher, sport, season and host platform, with contestant names read from the ballot itself.

In practical terms the award asks a simple question of its readers: which male track athlete from the paper's market deserves the season's honor? The answer comes entirely from the public, since the mechanic on file for the program is a public vote, and published material describes no judging panel alongside it. The schools tied to the 2025 nominees are listed below as places, drawn from the ballot's own nominee listing.

The dates and results behind this vote

The award ran in 2022 and returned in 2025, and that spread is what marks it as annual. The 2025 vote carried a June window, and the ballot now sits marked Poll Closed. On the closed page the publisher displays the finish: the leading nominee ended at 51% on 17,887 votes, while the runner-up took 29% on 10,302. A 2026 edition is the next expected.

Several facts a planner would want are simply not printed. Start and finish dates are never posted ahead of the vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whether editions ran in 2023 and 2024 is not stated on the ballot side either. No published rules text covers per-supporter vote limits, repeat voting or nominee eligibility, and the ballot offers no category breakdown because the award is a single honor. On the platform side, no promotional schedule entry exists for this market, so round dates beyond the June window are unstated.

Read together, the confirmed years and the June window give a supporter the shape of the calendar without its precise edges: the vote recurs, it has landed in early summer, and its exact bounds belong to the live page once a ballot posts.

How a supporter votes in this program

Right now the literal answer is that nobody can: the voting link serves the closed 2025 ballot, and Crowdsignal displays its final standings instead of a choice form. When a ballot is open, the task is short. The poll presents its answers as a list of nominees, and the answers pair each contestant with a school, and a supporter selects the nominee they back and submits the choice through the poll's controls. The standings shown on the same page carry the running tally, which is how the closed 2025 edition's results remain visible today.

Whether a nomination round precedes voting is not published, and nothing on the ballot describes a sign-in requirement; the mechanic on file is a plain public vote. Because the mechanics live on Crowdsignal rather than anywhere the paper operates directly, the whole task happens on the poll page: read the slate, choose, submit. That simplicity is the point of a public-vote format, in which the publisher supplies the nominees and the audience supplies the outcome.

Where a future ballot would appear, and whether the 2026 edition reuses the same address, is not stated, so the live link is the thing to watch. The status label in the poll title is the quickest tell: the 2025 page reads Poll Closed, and an open edition would read differently, so glance at the title before rallying support.

Where this ballot sits among Ohio's other public votes

Sibling programs to this award are all Ohio sport ballots run by other outlets: the Akron-area weekly athlete vote, the Cincinnati Enquirer's weekly honor, the Columbus Dispatch's weekly ballot, the Dayton Daily News weekly vote, the Dayton football weekly and the Fox 8 Friday Night Touchdown player vote. Each answers to its own publisher and carries its own dates and rules, so the facts here apply only to the Ashland ballot.

The contrast is rhythm and scope. The neighbors are weekly honors, rolling from ballot to ballot across many sports and large metro audiences in Akron, Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton. The Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote is the nearest in format, a year-honor rather than a week-honor, though it sits in a different market and answers to a different kind of outlet. The Ashland Times-Gazette award concentrates instead: a single sport, a single season, and a winner drawn from the high schools across the paper's market rather than a metro-wide field.

The practical upshot for a supporter is timing. A weekly ballot hands its readers a fresh chance on a repeating rhythm, while this award offers a single window per cycle, which makes the live ballot's status the thing to check before any plan is built. Treat each sibling page as its own reference, since cadence, host and rules differ program by program.

Rallying support for a nominee in this vote

Because this is a public Crowdsignal poll, support is a turnout exercise. While a ballot is open, the moves that matter are local: share the poll link directly with team families, ask the nominee's school community to pass it along, and time reminders for before the poll closes. The publisher states no position on outside voting help, and no rule for this ballot addresses bulk or paid votes, so any supporter weighing that route should read our guides to getting more votes online and to award-ballot campaigns, treat the organizer's silence as a reason for caution rather than permission, and plan around the June window the 2025 edition used.