Athlete of the Year 2025-2026: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the WICU-TV Athlete of the Year program is

Athlete of the Year 2025-2026 is a public-vote sports award run by WICU-TV, a Pennsylvania television station whose online presence is erienewsnow.com. Second Street hosts the ballot, the same platform the station uses for its other viewer promotions, at the address wicu.secondstreetapp.com. The program sits in the sport vertical and is decided entirely by public voting rather than by a panel.

The station runs the award alongside a wider slate of viewer promotions on the same Second Street account, including sweepstakes and other user-generated voting formats. That mix matters for supporters because it means the Athlete of the Year ballot behaves like the station's other UGCVoting programs: a photo-backed voting page where the public picks, rather than a sweepstakes entry or a judged competition.

The table below gathers the program's fixed details.

No city or county is named for this program, so the page describes it at the state level: it is WICU-TV's award, it is a Pennsylvania program, and the ballot itself is the authoritative source for anything the station prints on it.

The dated record: editions, windows and what is unpublished

The program has a long confirmed history. Editions are confirmed for every year from 2020 through 2026, each with its own dated ballot address on the station's Second Street account. The 2020 edition's window opened on May 7, 2020, and the 2026 edition ran from May 27, 2026 to June 24, 2026 before closing. That stretch of consecutive years is what makes the program annual.

The 2026 ballot is closed as of the latest information available. A 2027 edition has not been announced anywhere the station publishes, so the honest position is that the next window is unknown until WICU-TV posts a new dated ballot.

On the unpublished side, the ballot page does not carry a category list, a per-supporter vote cap, or an eligibility rule for nominees; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters in practice. A supporter who wants to vote daily, or a nominee's family planning an outreach push, has no printed rule to check against, and the safe assumption is that whatever the active ballot's instruction block says at voting time is the rule that governs.

The same applies to how nominees enter the field. The program runs in the UGCVoting photo format, which means entries carry images, but the station has not published the nomination route or any judging criteria alongside the public vote.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

Voting takes little effort. A supporter loads the current edition's address on wicu.secondstreetapp.com, finds the athlete they want to back among the photo-backed entries, and casts a vote directly on the page. Second Street handles the submission in the browser, and no account creation is printed as a requirement on the ballot page for this program.

What the supporter should not assume is the return rule. Some Second Street ballots allow repeat voting on a schedule and some do not, and WICU-TV has not printed which applies here. The instruction block on the active ballot is the only authoritative statement of how often a person may vote, so a supporter planning to return should read it first rather than copying habits from another station's contest.

Timing is the other practical constraint. The 2026 window ran from May 27 to June 24, and once a window closes the ballot flips to a closed state. Votes on a closed ballot are wasted effort, so anyone mobilizing a group should confirm the edition is live before asking people to click.

For a nominee's supporters, the sequence that fits this ballot is direct: share the exact edition address, tell people which athlete to select, and do it while the window is open. Broad posts that reach people outside Pennsylvania still work mechanically, since the ballot is a public web page, but the station has not published any residency requirement for voters either way.

How this ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Public-vote sports programs are plentiful across Pennsylvania, and Athlete of the Year 2025-2026 is distinct in scope and cadence. It is a station-wide, year-spanning honor decided in a single late-spring window, where most of its neighbours are weekly or single-sport ballots.

The closest structural neighbours include Mr. PA Football, a football-specific honor, and the PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week, which runs on a weekly rhythm during its season. The Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week and the WPXI Skylights Player of the Week are also weekly-format programs tied to football coverage.

Two more round out the set: the Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year, a single-sport annual honor, and the Morning Call Athlete of the Week, a newspaper-run weekly ballot. Every one of them reports to a separate publisher with separate rules, so a strategy that fits a weekly player-of-the-week ballot does not transfer automatically to WICU-TV's year-end award.

What makes the WICU-TV program different is the combination of a broad athlete-of-the-year framing, a late-spring voting window, and a seven-year run on the same Second Street account. For a nominee, that means the audience is general sports followers rather than one sport's base, and the push window is a single month rather than a rolling week.

Strengthening support within this program's rules

Because this is a short, single-window public vote, the outreach that works is the kind that lands while the ballot is live. The 2026 window ran May 27 to June 24, so a supporter campaign has roughly a month to convert goodwill into clicks. Sharing the exact edition address, naming the athlete to select, and asking at the start of the window rather than the end are the levers that cost nothing and respect whatever limits the ballot prints.

WICU-TV has not published a rule about outside help, paid votes or voting software for this program, which cuts both ways: nothing printed permits it, and nothing printed bans it. The cautious reading is that the station's instruction block on the live ballot governs, and any tactic that generates irregular voting patterns carries risk the supporter absorbs, not the station. Our overview at award-vote services explains how these packages work in general terms without promising any outcome.

The dependable path is organic: teammates, families, school communities and local sports groups reached directly, with a clear ask and the ballot link. That approach works in every edition regardless of what rules the next ballot prints.