News-Review Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the News-Review Athlete of the Week ballot is, and how it differs from its neighbours

Most of the ballots this page sits beside in Oregon narrow themselves to a sport. The state's football player of the week, the boys basketball and girls basketball player of the week, the baseball and softball ballots, and the Bend Bulletin's athletes of the week all define eligibility by the sport being played. The News-Review Athlete of the Week is built the other way around: it is a newspaper's general reader award, and a fresh edition can put football, volleyball, cross country and soccer nominees on the same form, exactly as the Sept. 9-14 ballot did.

That shape changes who competes. A volleyball player is not a token addition to a football ballot here; that edition's top two finishers were a volleyball nominee and a football nominee, separated by 9 percentage points. It also changes how a supporter campaigns, because the audience is the newspaper's whole readership rather than one sport's followers.

The organizer is The News-Review, an Oregon newspaper publishing at nrtoday.com. The vote runs on Crowdsignal, reached through poll.fm, at https://poll.fm/14367466. The table below lists the fixed facts in one place.

The dated record: editions, the September window, and what the ballot does not publish

The confirmed edition list holds 2023 and 2024. That pair is what qualifies the ballot as an annual feature rather than a short-lived experiment, and it is the entire published recurrence history. The newspaper has not stated a year for the next edition, so whether a 2025 poll appears depends on nrtoday.com's own coverage.

The dated window comes from the ballot itself. Its title carries the span Sept. 9-14 and the marker Poll Closed, which fixes the shape of a cycle: the newspaper posts the nominees, the poll runs for roughly the school week, and the form then displays final standings. The closed ballot's results are concrete. The leading volleyball nominee finished at 39 percent on 10,116 votes, and the leading football nominee at 30 percent on 7,808 votes, with cross country and soccer nominees also on the form.

What the ballot does not carry is just as useful to know. Nothing on the page sets out a category roster, a per-supporter voting limit or a nomination process, so those details and the next window's exact dates are things to confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The organizer likewise publishes no round calendar for future editions on the ballot page itself.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot today

The mechanic is deliberately plain, because Crowdsignal builds general-purpose polls rather than contest microsites. When a fresh edition is live, a supporter reaches it from The News-Review's coverage at nrtoday.com or types the poll.fm address directly. The form lists each nominated athlete with the school and sport they represent, the Sept. 9-14 ballot listing football, volleyball, cross country and soccer nominees together on the same page.

Casting a vote means selecting the option next to the chosen athlete and submitting the form. Crowdsignal confirms the choice has been counted, and while the poll is open the running tally is the main feedback a supporter gets. There is no account requirement shown on the ballot and no separate nomination step visible on the form itself; nomination happens through the newspaper's own process before the poll is posted.

After the window closes, the form becomes a results page. The Sept. 9-14 poll now shows its final percentages, which is how supporters who missed the window can still see where their nominee finished. Because each edition is its own poll, the closed form does not roll forward; a new edition means a new ballot address posted by the newspaper. Supporters who want the widest reach during the open days should plan around the school-week span the Sept. 9-14 title demonstrates.

Where this ballot sits among Oregon's other public votes

The sibling ballots linked below answer to different organizers and different formats, even though several share the Crowdsignal platform and the sport vertical. The Bend Bulletin Athletes of the Week is the closest structural cousin, another newspaper-run recognition program, but it answers to a publisher in a different part of the state, carrying a separate ballot and separate results.

The remaining siblings are sport-specific rather than all-sport: the football player of the week, the boys basketball and girls basketball ballots, and the baseball and softball editions. Each defines its nominee pool by sport, so an athlete's supporters never face cross-sport competition there.

For The News-Review's ballot that cross-sport framing is the practical difference. Vote totals are shared across every nominee on the form, so a small school's cross country runner competes directly against a football program's nominee for the same pool of reader votes. A supporter's campaign therefore has to reach beyond the team's own base, which is why the size and engagement of the newspaper's readership matters more here than on a sport-only ballot.

Strengthening support while the poll is open

Because the window runs for roughly a school week, timing does most of the work on this ballot. A campaign that starts the morning the poll appears collects the full span; a campaign that starts near the close does not. The organizer publishes no stated policy on outside help, bought participation or automated voting on the ballot page itself, so the binding constraint is simply the Crowdsignal form and whatever enforcement the newspaper applies to its own feature.

What works within the form's design is breadth: sharing the poll.fm link while the edition is live, asking the school community to pass it on, and reminding people before the poll closes. Methods that do not depend on the ballot's unpublished rules are covered in how to get more votes online. Anyone weighing paid participation should read what the organizer does and does not publish first, since no outside service controls how a newspaper counts and displays its own poll.