Ohio High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most visitors don't realize about this poll

Most people who land on a search for "Ohio high school athlete of the week" are looking for the football Player of the Week — a statewide SI / SBLive Ohio football poll that already has its own page. This is a different contest. The Athlete of the Week ballot covers every OHSAA sport, runs year-round, and has put a girls golfer on the same week's field as eleven football nominees. Zoey Merritt from Graham, who shot a 3-under-par 42 in August 2024, appeared alongside Tyrese Buchanan from St. Edward and Jalen Slaughter from Massillon. That is not how the football poll works.

The practical difference goes beyond sport coverage. A cross country campaign looks nothing like a football campaign. Bay's Michael Hanselman ran a 16:17.7 to win a Division II race — a time that earns the respect of distance coaches across the state — but the Bay cross country community does not organize around fan polls the way a Massillon football town does. Understanding that gap is where this poll's strategy starts.

The other thing worth knowing up front: raw vote totals are not published here. The SI / SBLive Ohio Athlete of the Week announces the winner each Monday but does not release the final count. Everything below is built from what the confirmed ballot data actually shows.

What two confirmed ballots reveal about the field

Two 2024 ballots are on record with full nominee lists. Together, they show three things worth knowing before any campaign.

Fifteen nominees is the standard. Both the Aug 25–31 and the Sept 8–14, 2024 ballots listed exactly fifteen names. That is wider than Ohio's football-only regional polls (which typically run six to ten names) and wider than the Cincinnati and Columbus Dispatch polls. In a fifteen-name field, concentrated community turnout behind one nominee carries more weight than it would in a smaller field — the vote splits fifteen ways unless someone organizes.

Football dominates, but does not monopolize. On the Sept 8–14 ballot, twelve of fifteen nominees came from football; three came from cross country, soccer, and golf. In an early-August ballot, volleyball and golf appeared alongside football. Any week's split depends on what OHSAA seasons are live — in winter, basketball and wrestling will fill the non-football slots. A non-football nominee on a football-heavy ballot is not at a natural disadvantage if their community turns out; the same fifteen-name vote-split dynamic applies to all nominees equally.

Program geography is statewide, not regional. The Sept 8–14 ballot alone pulled from Lakewood (St. Edward), Massillon, Canton, Toledo, Pickerington (Columbus metro), Fairview, Avon (Lorain County), Walsh Jesuit (Cuyahoga Falls), Princeton (Cincinnati metro), and Graham (Champaign County). That spread means a campaign in Toledo competes against one in the Columbus suburbs on equal footing. There is no metro weighting; the ballot does not favor Cleveland or Columbus by design.

Ohio's prep sports ecosystem and what it means on this ballot

Ohio runs seven OHSAA enrollment divisions (Div I = largest, Div VII = smallest), and the programs that surface on statewide fan polls do not cluster in one tier. St. Edward and Archbishop Hoban are large Catholic private schools in the northeast with national-level football and basketball programs; their alumni networks span the Cleveland metro and reach into national college programs. Massillon Washington and Canton McKinley are public-school institutions whose football histories are woven into small-city identity in a way that moves votes without any external prompting — a Canton McKinley game is a civic event, not just an athletic one.

But the confirmed ballots also show smaller programs: Crestwood (Portage County), Graham (small-town Champaign County), Marion Local (one of the smallest-enrollment programs in the state, and a Div VII dynasty). The division gap does not determine outcomes here — it determines absolute fan base size, not participation rate. A school of 200 students in rural northwest Ohio that turns out its community at fifty percent can out-poll a 3,000-student school that turns out at three percent. That arithmetic is why Div VI Kirtland and Div VII Marion Local are legitimate threats on any statewide ballot.

The non-football sports introduce a different community topology entirely. A girls golf champion like Zoey Merritt from Graham draws on a golf-specific parent and club network — smaller in raw numbers than a football booster base, but often denser and faster to activate because the community is already organized around travel scheduling and score tracking. Distance running communities in northeast Ohio — where Lake, Bay, and Crestwood compete in cross country — have similar tight-knit digital networks. If your nominee comes from one of those sports, the organizing infrastructure already exists; it just needs to be pointed at Sunday night.

Running a campaign from nomination to Sunday close

Getting onto the ballot starts with a well-framed email to [email protected] — the confirmed Ohio regional editor contact for High School on SI. The submission that works gives the editor what they need to write the nominee entry: athlete name, school, sport, the opponent or event, the full performance (stats, context, what the result meant to the team). A game-deciding moment — Cole Kimble's 19-yard field goal with one second left for Princeton — is as compelling as a pure counting stat. Get that email in Saturday night or Sunday morning, before the week's nominees are finalized.

Once your athlete is on the ballot, the contest is a Sunday deadline with a fifteen-name field. A structured vote campaign exists for exactly this kind of open, uncapped weekly poll — reaching more real voters across the full week rather than relying on a single Sunday push. Manual voters can return through the week; casual supporters who see the link Saturday often forget by Sunday afternoon unless the reminder arrives. The campaigns that consolidate a fifteen-name split are the ones that build across all seven days, not just the final evening.

For more Ohio contests, the Ohio fan-vote guide covers the full statewide picture; the football-only SBLive Ohio poll and the regional metro ballots for Cincinnati and Columbus are there as well. The national directory of weekly prep sports fan votes is at /usa/, and the sports fan-poll vote support guide explains how weekly open-ballot campaigns are typically structured.