Chillicothe Gazette Female Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A city-sized ballot in a state of metro contests

Ohio's athlete of the week votes mostly belong to big newsrooms. The Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week speak for metro audiences, and the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote belongs to a Cleveland television station. This ballot sits at the small end of that range: the Chillicothe Gazette Female Athlete of the Week serves one city and the high school sports community around it in south-central Ohio, and the newspaper that runs the vote carries Chillicothe in its own name.

The organizer is the Chillicothe Gazette, a newspaper whose home on the web is chillicothegazette.com. The balloting host is Crowdsignal, which serves each weekly ballot through poll.fm, and the series' voting address is https://poll.fm/15526865. The vertical is high school sport, restricted on this ballot to female nominees, and the mechanic is reader choice in its plainest form: any reader who reaches the poll page can pick a nominee and send it in. No account, fee or entry form stands between a reader and the vote button.

Three facts fix the program's identity. The publisher and the market are the same word, which makes this a city franchise rather than a regional one. The gender split matters, because the program's own materials name no companion male ballot. And the platform is a poll host rather than a contest site, so each week's ballot is a single question with a short list of nominees and a percentage result.

The dated run of the series

The confirmed history covers seasons in 2023, 2024 and 2025, evidenced by 32 weekly ballots on the poll.fm series dated across that span. The season shape runs from September to May, matching the Ohio high school sports calendar, with a fresh ballot appearing roughly each week while school is in session. The run is annual by its own pattern of seasons, and the next season is expected in 2026.

The voting address above holds the newest ballot of the run, and its own title marks it as closed. A closed ballot still shows how a week resolves: on that poll, one nominee finished at 54 percent with 1,338 votes cast, a tally the poll page displays as a percentage share beside each answer. That is the only published figure attached to the series, and it comes from the ballot itself rather than from the newspaper's coverage.

What the Gazette has not printed is the timing detail a supporter most wants: the opening and closing day of the next ballot, and any limit on how often the same reader may vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The weekly rhythm is known, the season span is known, but the day a given poll goes live and the day it closes appear only on the poll page once that poll exists.

For anyone backing a nominee, the practical takeaway is simple. Between September and May, assume a new ballot is up somewhere in the week and treat the Gazette's sports coverage and the poll.fm address as the two places the current link surfaces. Outside that span, the series is between seasons, and the 2026 season is the next one to expect.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The mechanic could hardly be simpler. A supporter reaches the poll.fm address, or the athlete of the week link the Gazette publishes with its sports coverage, and lands on a single-question poll. The page lists that week's nominees, each described by school and by the performance that earned the nomination, with a radio button beside every name. The supporter picks one, presses the vote button, and the page returns the running percentage share for each nominee.

Nothing in the flow the poll page describes asks for an account, a login or any payment. The ballot is open to any reader who reaches it, which is why the vote behaves like a popularity sprint inside a short window: the nominee whose community rallies fastest within the poll's open days takes the largest share. Because the poll resets weekly, a missed ballot cannot be made up later; the following week is a new question with a new nominee list.

Two things the ballot page does not settle are worth naming plainly. It prints no rule on how many times the same reader may vote in a given poll, and it prints no closing time for the week's window. Both facts live on the live poll itself, which is where a supporter should look before planning a push. The write-in of a name not listed is likewise not described anywhere on the ballot, so the safe assumption is that only the listed nominees are votable in a given week.

One more practical note: the percentage tally shown after voting is the same tally that decides the winner, so a supporter can watch a nominee's share move while the poll is still open and judge whether the push is working.

Where this ballot sits among Ohio's athlete votes

Set beside its siblings, this program differs on three axes. The first is market size: Chillicothe is a single city with a single newspaper behind the vote, where the Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week cover metro regions. The second is the gender restriction: this is the sibling ballot framed entirely around female nominees, which changes who rallies and how the nominee lists read week to week.

The third axis is sport scope. The Dayton High School Football Player of the Week narrows to one sport and one season, while this ballot follows the whole girls sports year from September through May, so a fall cross country nominee and a spring track nominee compete under the same format in different months. That breadth is also why the series needs 32 ballots to cover a season span that a football-only vote would not.

What the siblings share is the shape: a newspaper or station publisher, a public vote, and a weekly or seasonal rhythm printed on the ballot itself. A reader moving between these Ohio pages will find the same poll-style mechanic everywhere, with the differences living in the publisher, the market and the nominee pool rather than in how the vote is cast. That consistency is useful for a supporter new to Chillicothe's version: nothing about the button, the tally or the weekly reset will feel unfamiliar.

Strengthening support inside this poll's format

Because the ballot is a one-question weekly poll, the levers a supporter has are timing and reach. The window is short, so the poll.fm link needs to reach the nominee's community as early in the week as possible, while the largest share of the school's network can still act on it. Team group chats, the school's own channels and family networks are the natural first stops, since the ballot asks for nothing but a click and the descriptions on the page do the persuading.

The Gazette publishes no statement about outside voting help for this series, so whatever support arrives is governed by the ballot's own rules. The format itself is settled: a free public vote, a percentage result, and a fresh nominee list every week. Supporters who want a fuller picture of what a wider push involves can read our votes guide, and anyone weighing paid support for an award vote can review award vote support before deciding. No service of any kind, ours included, can promise victory in a poll whose outcome is a live percentage share.