Statesman Journal Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Thursday noon deadline is the whole story

Most people who show up ready to vote on Friday are already too late. The Statesman Journal Athlete of the Week closes Thursday at noon PT — not Sunday, not Friday, noon Thursday. That single fact separates every campaign that works from every one that doesn't.

By comparison: the SI/SBLive Oregon football poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m.; the Register-Guard boys poll closes Thursday at 11 a.m. Those are the three major Oregon weekly athlete polls, and this one has the earliest deadline of the three. A supporter who learned about the poll from a Friday night recap article is reading about last week's race.

The math that follows from a Thursday noon close is simple: the real voting window is Tuesday and Wednesday. A ballot that goes live Monday or Tuesday and closes Thursday noon gives campaigns about 48 hours. That is not a lot of time to reach an email-gated electorate — and email-gated is the other thing worth understanding before anything else.

What "SecondStreet" actually means for your vote count

The SI/SBLive Oregon football poll is anonymous and unlimited — click, click again, no cap, no account. This poll is not that. The Statesman Journal runs its ballot through SecondStreet, a platform that requires an email address to register a vote. Each email is a distinct entry. The poll tracks them.

That changes the arithmetic of a campaign entirely. On an anonymous platform, one household can contribute meaningfully with one phone over a week. Here, the question is how many distinct email addresses a campaign can get to the ballot before Thursday noon. A team with 80 players each texting one parent is ahead of a team with 10 people clicking all day.

The fall 2023 ballot shows what the nominee pool looks like: four athletes from four different sports and four different schools on the same week — Kaden Martirano (West Salem, football), Lucy Becker (South Salem, cross country), Brooke Friesen (Sprague, volleyball), Sophie Pass (Salem Academy, girls soccer). Cross-sport, cross-school. A volleyball team's boosters and a football program's parents are mobilizing against each other on the same ballot. The one that gets more email addresses to the poll wins.

The March 2026 girls basketball ballot leaned on smaller programs: both Amity (Adie Nisly, Eliza Nisly) and Regis (Hadley Foster, Frankie Koehnke) appeared alongside West Salem and Silverton. Amity is a small district. But in an email-gated poll, a tight, connected Amity community converting 300 emails is closer in practice to 300 emails from South Salem's larger population than it would be if votes were anonymous and uncapped. The platform levels the size gap more than most people expect.

Salem-Keizer's coverage map and who shows up

The Statesman Journal's footprint runs from the Salem city schools — West Salem, South Salem, Sprague, McNary, North Salem — out into the surrounding districts: Cascade, Silverton, Wilsonville, Stayton, Regis, Amity, Salem Academy. That is roughly the Willamette Valley corridor between the Cascades and the Coast Range foothills, from Wilsonville in the north to Stayton in the east and Amity in the southwest.

The big Salem city schools carry large alumni networks. West Salem and South Salem are the largest programs in the coverage area. But the surrounding communities are tighter and often faster to move. A Stayton or Amity campaign can run through a single parent-group thread and reach most of its effective network in one afternoon. Silverton, which sits east of Salem in Marion County, is part of the same coverage map — Marley Wertz appeared on the March 2026 girls basketball ballot.

Wilsonville shows up on the statewide SI football ballot too — it finished as 5A runner-up in 2024 — but here it competes in a regional frame where the comparison set is Salem-area schools, not the whole state. A Wilsonville athlete on the Statesman Journal ballot faces a different electorate than the same athlete on an SI statewide poll.

For broader Oregon context, the Oregon fan-vote guide covers SI/SBLive weekly polls and annual awards statewide. The national directory collects similar local-paper athlete polls across the country — most of them SecondStreet or similar email-gated platforms, with the same Thursday-window dynamics.

Running a real campaign before Thursday noon

The SecondStreet platform's email gate means the campaign question is not "how many times can we vote?" but "how many real people can we get to the ballot before noon Thursday?" Those are different problems, and the second one is harder.

The window opens when the ballot article goes live — usually Monday or Tuesday. The first job is finding that article quickly. Search statesmanjournal.com sports section; the nomination email route (sports desk contact) is also the right place to confirm when the ballot goes live each week.

Then the reach question: every player on the roster texting their own contacts gets more distinct email addresses to the poll than a booster page posting to a single audience. Coaches forwarding the link to parent chains, class group chats, and alumni contacts each extend the email universe. The goal is width, not repetition.

Wednesday evening is the last effective push — the ballot closes at noon the next day, and anyone who sees a reminder Thursday morning may or may not act in time. For campaigns that want to extend their reach beyond the school's immediate network, structured sports fan-poll vote support exists for email-gated weekly polls of this type.