Chillicothe Gazette Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Chillicothe Gazette Football Player of the Week is and who runs it

A Chillicothe family or local business that wants to stand behind a Friday-night performance runs into the same practical question every fall: where does the vote actually happen, and who is behind it. The answer here is unusually simple. The Chillicothe Gazette Football Player of the Week is decided entirely by readers, one week at a time, and the organizer is the Chillicothe Gazette, the city's daily newspaper at chillicothegazette.com.

The paper supplies the content that makes the ballot worth voting on. Each round lists a handful of high school football nominees, every nominee introduced by a line about the most recent game, such as catches, rushing yards, touchdowns or tackles against a named opponent. Supporters read those lines and pick the performance they think deserved the week. Nothing is charged, nobody registers, and no panel judges; the public vote is the entire mechanism.

The balloting runs on Crowdsignal, reached through poll.fm addresses the paper shares. The ballot linked from this page, https://poll.fm/14561794, is the most recent poll in the series, and because it belongs to the 2024 season it now reads closed.

The dated record: which seasons ran and when rounds fall

Two seasons of this program are confirmed: 2023 and 2024. Across those seasons the series produced twelve ballots, which is the shape you would expect from a weekly award running the length of a high school football regular season. Every round that has been identified fell in September or October, the months when Ohio's Friday-night schedule is at its densest, so the practical season for supporters is a short, intense window rather than a year-round commitment.

What the paper does not publish is almost as important for anyone planning a push. There is no advance calendar of round dates, no printed open and close time for any individual poll, and no announced plan for a 2026 or 2027 season. Each week's deadline exists only on that week's own ballot, which is why a supporter who waits until late in a round is working blind.

No promotional round dates for this market exist beyond the paper's own posting, so the Gazette's channels are the single reliable signal that a new poll has gone live. For a nominee's supporters that compresses the campaign: the window that matters for gathering votes is the few days a poll stays open, and rallying support early matters more here than in a month-long contest.

How a supporter votes on the Chillicothe Gazette ballot today

Voting here takes four clicks and no account. A supporter opens the week's poll.fm page, reads the nominee lines the Gazette has written, marks the circle beside the chosen player, and submits. Crowdsignal logs the choice at once and the running tally for that round appears, so supporters can watch a close race move in real time. The ballot offers no write-in box; the choices are limited to the nominees the paper listed that week.

Two things about the current state of the ballot are worth stating plainly. The poll at https://poll.fm/14561794 belongs to the end of the 2024 season and now reads closed, so visiting it today shows a finished result rather than a live vote. And the scale of a round can be substantial for a market this size: the leading nominee in a 2024 round finished with 20,802 votes, which tells any campaign planner that these small weekly polls can still draw five-figure participation when a community mobilizes.

Whether a visitor may vote repeatedly, or once per day, is nowhere spelled out on the poll page. Crowdsignal applies its own duplicate controls to polls generally, so the practical position is that a supporter votes as the form allows on the day and returns for the next week's fresh round rather than trying to replay a closed one.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Ohio runs more weekly fan ballots than almost any state, and this one is easy to place among them. The Gazette's poll is football-only and small-market: it serves Chillicothe and the schools around it, including programs from Waverly, Huntington, Unioto, Southeastern and visiting opponents such as Mt. Healthy, and every nominee comes from a single sport. That focus is its appeal. A football family backing a local nominee competes against the same community, not against every athlete in a metro area.

The nearest large neighbours work differently. The Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week are all-sport ballots run by big metro dailies, and the Dayton Daily News runs both an all-sport award and a football-only player of the week, the closest structural cousin to this poll. Further out, the Akron-area athlete of the week and the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote show the other end of the range, from regional TV coverage to a season-long year-end vote.

What separates them for a supporter is competition density and cycle speed. A Chillicothe round is won by mobilizing a single school community quickly; a metro or statewide ballot rewards broader, longer campaigns.

Strengthening support in a weekly poll like this

Because each round lives for only a few days, support in this program is won by speed and repetition inside one school community. The nominees who draw five-figure totals are the ones whose schools push the ballot hard the moment it appears: team group chats, parent networks, the opponent's name in the subject line to sharpen the rivalry. The Gazette has published no policy on outside help for this ballot; nothing printed gives an organizer rule to trip over, only the weekly deadline to beat.

For readers weighing every option, our award votes page explains how purchased support is handled for ballots of this shape, and the legality guide answers the questions most people ask before spending anything. Whatever the mix, the plan should be built around the round's own clock: share the link the day it appears, remind midweek, and treat the final stretch as the whole game.