Our Times Recorder Track and Field Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Inside the Times Recorder's year-end track and field vote

The Times Recorder, the Ohio newspaper behind zanesvilletimesrecorder.com, gives its readers a year-end Athlete of the Year ballot for track and field. The ballot lives at https://poll.fm/17169093 on Crowdsignal's poll.fm service. It asks one question in the paper's own wording, who its athlete of the year in track and field is, and lists the nominees beneath it. The program's own pages name only Ohio as geography, so the market is the Times Recorder's Ohio readership rather than any single town.

The 2026 ballot carried nominees from Tri-Valley, River View, Ridgewood, John Glenn, Morgan, Maysville and Zanesville. Every nominee on the ballot is a minor, so this page describes the field by school and leaves the names on the ballot itself.

Two details in that table deserve emphasis. The voting URL is the exact ballot address, not a general poll.fm landing page, and the organizer is a newspaper, not a school district or a sports governing body, which means the editorial choices around the award belong to the Times Recorder alone.

When the Times Recorder track and field vote has run

Two years stand on the books for this award, 2022 and 2026, and that pair makes it an annual program, with the next edition expected in 2027. The 2026 ballot sat entirely inside June: the publisher's own coverage told readers that voting would stay open until Monday, June 15, at 5 p.m., and the Crowdsignal page now carries a closed marker.

The final tally on that ballot put the Tri-Valley nominee in front with 12,878 votes, a 46 percent share of the total cast. The remaining nominees finished well behind, which is typical of a school-community vote where a single school's audience turns out in force.

Nominations run on a separate clock. The publisher's 2026 coverage states that nominations can be emailed to [email protected] by noon Sunday, with the field set through Sunday. That instruction was written for the paper's seasonal sports coverage of area schools, and it is the only nomination route the publisher has printed for this vote.

No category list appears on the ballot; the 2026 page asks a single athlete-of-the-year question. What the publisher has also not printed is a vote cap, an eligibility rule for nominees, or a daily-vote limit for supporters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter casts a vote in the track and field ballot

The mechanic on the Crowdsignal ballot is deliberately simple. A supporter opens https://poll.fm/17169093, reads the single question the Times Recorder poses, and sees the nominee list with each athlete's school beside the name. Selecting a nominee and pressing the vote control is the whole interaction, and the results view shows the running percentage for each school's nominee.

Three practical points follow from that design. The ballot is a plain web page, so the link travels well in team group chats and opens on any browser without an app. The page states neither whether a login is required nor whether repeat visits are filtered, so anyone planning a second vote on another day should take the live ballot as the rulebook. And nothing on the ballot indicates a nomination step for voters; nominations go to the publisher's sports desk by email, so a supporter's job is confined to choosing among the nominees already listed.

Timing matters more than technique in a vote like this. Because the window is short, support that arrives in the final days can decide the outcome, which is why school communities that organize early tend to dominate the tally. A supporter who discovers the ballot after the close marker appears can do nothing for that edition except wait for the publisher to open the next one.

Where this ballot sits among Ohio's athlete votes

Ohio runs a crowded field of public athlete votes, and this one is distinct in three ways. It is a year-end honour rather than one of the weekly series, it belongs to the Times Recorder rather than a large metro daily or a television station, and its ballot covers track and field specifically instead of every sport at once.

Its closest neighbours on this site are the other Ohio programs: the weekly athlete ballots from Akron, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Columbus Dispatch and the Dayton Daily News, the Dayton gridiron player of the week vote, and the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote. Every one of those ballots answers to a different publisher, and none shares this program's voting URL or its June close.

What separates them for a supporter is cadence. A weekly vote rewards a school community that can mobilize week after week, while a year-end award like this one concentrates the whole campaign into a single June window. A football-only vote, such as the Dayton weekly ballot, draws from a different nominee pool entirely.

The Fox 8 vote is the closest structural cousin, because it too honours a season's best player rather than running weekly, but it belongs to a television station and covers football. The Times Recorder's award remains the only confirmed track and field ballot of this kind among the Ohio set.

Building support for a track and field nominee

Winning support in this ballot is a matter of moving people to one Crowdsignal page before the publisher closes it. The moves that work are ordinary ones: send the exact ballot link, https://poll.fm/17169093, to the team's families, ask a coach to post it in the school's sports groups, and time the reminder for the final days of the June window, when a school's turnout decides the tally. The Times Recorder has not published any policy on outside help for this award, so anything beyond encouraging real people to vote sits in uncertain territory. To see the wider playbook for public-vote campaigns, read our votes guide, and the award-specific context sits on our award votes page. Neither page promises a result; both explain the mechanics and the risks a nominee carries when support is outsourced.