Athlete of the Week 2024-25: Week 35: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Morning Call Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

Most Pennsylvania reader ballots covered on this site are single seasonal contests: one nomination round, one voting window, one winner. The Athlete of the Week run by The Morning Call is built the other way round. It renews every week through the school year, and the page named "Athlete of the Week 2024-25: Week 35" is one ballot inside that series, not a standalone award.

The organizer is The Morning Call, the daily newspaper headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and its coverage area for this feature is the Lehigh Valley. Each week the paper nominates three male and three female senior athletes from Lehigh Valley area schools, and readers vote for one of them. The ballot runs on Second Street as a Ballot/VotingBallot promotion at the mcall.secondstreetapp.com address, the same platform the paper uses for its other reader promotions.

That weekly shape changes what a supporter needs to know. A vote in Week 35 counted only toward Week 35, and the season's thirty-three weekly ballots each stood on their own. The fixed facts about this ballot are set out in the table below.

The dated facts for the 2024-25 season and its weekly windows

The 2024-25 season is the season this specific ballot belongs to. Its first weekly promotion opened on August 26, 2024 and the last weekly window closed on May 15, 2025, giving the season thirty-three separate ballots from Week 1 through Week 35. Week 35 itself accepted votes for four days, from May 12 to May 15, 2025, and its status is closed.

The series did not stop there. Three seasons are published for the program: 2024-25 first, then 2025-26, then 2026-27. The 2026-27 season already has a Week 1 ballot published, which ran August 31 to September 3, 2026. So this is an established weekly feature with an autumn-to-spring rhythm each school year, not a first-time award.

What the ballot page does not carry matters as much. It publishes no list of award categories beyond the single athlete honour, and it sets out no rule about the number of votes a single person may cast in a round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The weekly voting rhythm, by contrast, is published by the paper directly: voting typically runs each week from 5 p.m. ET on Mondays to 9 a.m. ET on Thursdays, with winners announced Thursday evening.

Because every week is a separate Second Street promotion, the dates above belong to Week 35 alone. Another week's ballot carries another four-day window, and the only safe way to date any round is to read that round's own page.

How a supporter votes on the current Morning Call ballot

The mechanic is deliberately plain, which is part of how this ballot differs from nomination-based contests. To take part, a supporter finds the week currently live, sees the six senior athletes The Morning Call nominated that week, picks one and submits. There is no entry form, no registration round and no fee anywhere in the promotion details for Week 35.

Timing is the part people get wrong. A weekly window lasts only from Monday evening to Thursday morning, so a ballot discovered on a Friday is already finished. The window for Week 35, for example, ran May 12 to May 15, 2025 and then closed for good. Which week is open when a reader arrives changes every Monday through the season, so the current ballot is always a different promotion from the one linked here.

The practical sequence is short. Find the live week on The Morning Call's Athlete of the Week listing, open that ballot on Second Street, choose one of the nominated senior athletes, and submit before 9 a.m. ET on Thursday. The paper announces the winner that Thursday evening, and the following Monday a fresh ballot opens with a new set of nominations from Lehigh Valley area schools.

Supporters who want to follow an athlete across the season should expect to repeat this each week, because no weekly result carries into the next round.

How this weekly ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

The Morning Call series is not the only public-vote award in Pennsylvania, and the differences are easy to see once the siblings are lined up. Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week and the PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week both narrow themselves to one sport and one gender, while the Morning Call ballot takes senior athletes of both genders across the Lehigh Valley's whole sports calendar.

Two other siblings are station-run and even more narrowly framed: the WPXI Skylights Player of the Week and the WTAE Operation Football Play of the Week are Pittsburgh-market television features tied to Friday night football coverage. The Mr. PA Football award and the Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year are season-capping honours rather than weekly rounds, so their voting windows open once and close once.

That contrast is the practical takeaway. A supporter of a Lehigh Valley senior athlete gets more than thirty chances a season to vote under The Morning Call's banner, at a known Monday-to-Thursday rhythm, on a Second Street ballot the paper has run across three seasons, from 2024-25 through 2026-27. A supporter in a single-sport state award usually gets one window per year, so the two programme types reward different campaigning habits.

Supporting an athlete well within this weekly format

Recurring ballots reward rhythm over bursts. Because each Morning Call round runs only from Monday evening to Thursday morning, a school community that spreads the word on Monday night reaches people while the window is still open, and a community that waits until Wednesday has already lost half the time. Sharing the exact ballot link for the live week, rather than the closed Week 35 address, is what turns attention into counted votes.

The organizer's position is what it is for any reader poll: the ballot is free, public and run under The Morning Call's own promotion rules, and the paper publishes those rules on its site. Nothing in the published promotion details offers a paid route into the result, and any outside vote support a family is weighing has to be judged against the paper's rules and the general guidance at buying award votes. What no outside method changes is the calendar: votes cast after 9 a.m. ET on Thursday count nowhere, and no weekly result carries into the next round.