The Eagle-Gazette High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Eagle-Gazette Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

The problem a supporter hits with this ballot is simple: the program's name tells you almost nothing about what is on it. Every week the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, the daily newspaper serving Lancaster, Ohio, posts a public vote naming its high school athlete of the week, carried on Crowdsignal's poll.fm service. Every Monday brings a new slate of high school athletes, and readers pick their favourite before the Friday 5 p.m. close.

The ballot lives at poll.fm/17012251, which is one poll in a running series rather than a permanent home page. When a week's poll closes, the page keeps the final results visible, showing each nominee's share of the vote and raw total, and the next Monday brings a replacement ballot with a new nominee list.

Facts at a glance

Because the slate changes weekly, the poll page is the sole authoritative view of who is currently nominated. The newspaper announces each round through its own channels, and the ballot itself carries the nominee names, their schools and the live vote counts for the week in progress.

The dated history of this program

The confirmed edition years for the Eagle-Gazette High School Athlete of the Week are 2022, 2025 and 2026. The 2022 evidence is a standalone note, while the 2025 and 2026 seasons are documented across fourteen ballots on the poll.fm series, dated from August through May. That gives the program an annual shape anchored to the Ohio school year, with weekly polls stacked between an August opening and a May close.

The weekly window itself is the publisher's own stated rule: each poll runs from 6 a.m. Monday to 5 p.m. Friday. That five-day rhythm is the most useful dated fact on the page, because it tells a supporter exactly when a fresh slate appears and when the chance to vote ends, without needing any other calendar.

What the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette has not published is the standing structure of the ballot: no list of which sports qualify, no printed per-voter cap beyond the phrase that fans can vote as often as allowed, and no nomination procedure. A supporter who wants the current week's categories and any finer rules should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Whether the program continues into the next school year after the 2026 season is likewise a question only the newspaper's own pages can answer, since the confirmed years stop at the most recent season.

How a supporter votes in the Eagle-Gazette poll today

Voting takes little effort. Open the current Crowdsignal ballot at poll.fm/17012251, read the nominee list for the week, select one athlete and submit. The standings appear beside each name, with each nominee's percentage and vote count displayed while the poll stays open, so the race is visible the whole time.

Two features of this ballot shape how a supporter actually behaves. First, the window is short and fixed: voting opens Monday at 6 a.m. and closes Friday at 5 p.m., so a campaign that starts Thursday has one day where an earlier start would have had five. Second, the publisher's stated rule is that fans can vote as often as allowed, which puts the emphasis on repeat participation and on rallying a school community rather than on a single well-timed push.

There is no nomination step on the ballot itself. The Lancaster Eagle-Gazette assembles each week's slate and posts it, and the poll page offers no entry form. A supporter's entire job is to show up during the window and vote for their nominee, as many times as the poll permits, until the Friday close locks the result.

Because no login is printed anywhere on the poll page, the practical friction is low, which is exactly why organized repeat voting moves these weekly results so visibly.

How this ballot sits beside its Ohio neighbours

Ohio runs a crowded field of high school athlete of the week programs, and the Eagle-Gazette ballot is the local end of that spectrum. Where statewide or big-city ballots aggregate nominees from large metro areas, this poll draws its slate from the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette's own coverage area, which keeps the nominee pool small and the vote totals tightly bunched.

The nearest structural cousins on this site are the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week and the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week, both newspaper-run weekly votes in the same vertical. Further afield sit the Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week, the Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week, the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week and the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote.

What distinguishes the Eagle-Gazette edition is scale and cadence. A smaller readership means a few hundred votes can decide a week, where a metro-wide ballot may need thousands. And because the publisher states its Monday-to-Friday window openly, this program is easier to plan around than ballots whose weekly timing has to be discovered from the platform. For a Lancaster supporter, the local poll is also the one where a single school community can plausibly swing the result on its own.

Strengthening support within this poll's rules

Everything that works in this program flows from its two stated facts: a five-day window and voting as often as allowed. A supporter group that starts Monday morning, sets a daily reminder through the Friday 5 p.m. close, and asks teammates, families and the student section to do the same, extracts far more from the mechanic than a single-day burst, because the allowed repeat voting rewards persistence across all five days.

The publisher has published nothing about outside help, vote software or bots on this ballot, and no numeric cap is published either. Silence on a rule is not the same as permission to break one, and the platform may still throttle unusual activity on its own side. The safe reading is that the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette expects organic community voting, and anything that looks like automation risks the result without any published rule to appeal to.

For supporters weighing every option, the honest framing is on buying award votes and the general legality question at is buying votes legal. What no outside service can change is the structure: a small local ballot, a short window, and a result decided by whoever shows up most consistently for one athlete across five days.