Here is where to vote for Times Recorder Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Times Recorder Athlete of the Week vote is

The Times Recorder Athlete of the Week is a public vote published by the Times Recorder, a newspaper serving Ohio readers through zanesvilletimesrecorder.com. The program belongs to the high school sports vertical: each week the paper nominates a short list of student athletes from winter-season competition and asks its readers to choose a winner. The ballot is hosted on Crowdsignal, the survey platform behind poll.fm, and each weekly edition lives at its own poll.fm address.

The format is deliberately simple. A poll page presents the nominees as answers, each carrying a school and a short performance note from the covered week, and a supporter votes by clicking through. There is no entry form, no payment step and no account requirement anywhere on the ballot, which keeps the barrier to participation about as low as a fan vote can be.

Since every nominee is a high school student, this reference page describes the program by publisher, sport and season rather than reprinting any athlete's name or stat line. The live poll carries the current list.

The dated record for this Ohio athlete of the week series

Two editions of the program are confirmed, in 2025 and 2026, which qualifies the series as an annual one. The ballot most recently confirmed covers the Jan. 12-18 nominee window and its Crowdsignal page now carries the label Poll Closed, meaning the tally on that address is final. The 2026 season is the latest cycle on file, and the natural expectation is a fresh series of weekly ballots through 2027 while the winter sports calendar runs.

What the paper has not put on the poll page matters as much as what is there. Opening and closing dates for the current window appear only in the paper's own announcement story, not on the poll itself, so the precise schedule for the next edition should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The list of categories is likewise off-page, since the ballot is a single athlete of the week question with no published breakdown beyond the nominee answers themselves. No rules text accompanies the poll: nothing printed there describes eligibility, a limit per supporter or how the weekly winner is announced beyond the paper's own coverage.

For a series that recurs this frequently, that thinness is normal. Weekly fan votes tend to publish a nominee list and little else, and readers who need the rules have to rely on whatever the current ballot and the paper's story specify when the window opens.

How a supporter votes in the current poll

The mechanic is the plainest a fan vote can offer. A supporter opens the Crowdsignal ballot at its poll.fm address, reads the nominee list, clicks the answer carrying the athlete they want to back, and submits on the same page. No login, no email and no fee sit between the click and the counted vote, which is why support campaigns for polls of this kind live or die on how quickly a reached supporter can act.

Two practical points follow from the format. First, every weekly edition is a separate poll with its own address, so a link saved from the Jan. 12-18 ballot reaches a closed poll and nothing else; the working address for the current week has to come from the Times Recorder's own announcement. Second, the answer options change each week, so any argument a supporter makes for their pick has to be made fresh, because last week's stat line no longer appears anywhere on the live page.

What the ballot does not specify is repeat behavior. The Crowdsignal page carries no printed statement on whether a person may vote once or come back during the window, and the paper publishes no supplementary rules alongside it. In practice that leaves the poll's own enforcement as the binding limit, which is the safest thing for any supporter to assume before encouraging repeat visits.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Ohio runs a crowded field of publisher-run athlete of the week votes, and the Times Recorder's edition is the local entry rather than a statewide oddity. Its closest structural cousins on this site include the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week, both run by big-city Gannett mastheads, and the Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week, which serves a single metro market in much the same way the Times Recorder serves its own readership.

The Dayton market contributes two editions, the Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week, the latter narrowing to a single sport where the Times Recorder ballot spans the winter schedule more broadly. Television adds the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote, a broadcast-backed award that reaches further than any newspaper poll.

What distinguishes the Times Recorder's program is scale and cadence rather than format. Like its newspaper cousins it publishes weekly Crowdsignal ballots during the season, each anchored to a small nominee list from local competition, and support for a nominee is won the same way everywhere in this family: by reaching the people who actually know the athlete's name.

Strengthening support in a weekly high school poll

Support in this program comes down to speed and reach. The ballot is a single Crowdsignal click with no signup, so the effective move is to put the live poll.fm address in front of people who already follow the athlete, the school or the team, in the first day or so of the window while attention is fresh. A closed poll like the Jan. 12-18 edition cannot be reopened, which makes the paper's weekly announcement the moment any push has to start.

The Times Recorder has printed no rule on this page about outside help, voting software or bulk support, so nobody can quote the organizer blessing or forbidding it; the live ballot and the paper's current story are where any such statement would appear. What is certain is that the poll counts what is submitted, and that a weekly award decided by a small nominee list swings on modest margins.

For a fuller picture of what works on polls of this shape, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the paid side of the question, our award votes page explains how that market is usually structured.