GameTimePA YAIAA Girls Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the YAIAA girls poll and why it exists

The audience for this ballot is the YAIAA community itself: teammates, parents, students and local readers who follow girls volleyball, tennis, soccer, cross country and the other fall sports across the conference. GameTimePA builds the poll around performances that already happened on the field, so a nomination carries a short description of what an athlete did that week. The 2024 ballot illustrates the shape: volleyball nominees from Delone Catholic and Dallastown, and a tennis nominee from New Oxford, each credited with a specific stat line or match result from YAIAA competition.

That framing matters for anyone trying to understand how the poll works. It is not an open-entry award and it is not judged by a panel; it is a reader vote in which the school communities effectively compete to turn out the most support during the few days a ballot stays open. Schools with active social accounts and committed student sections tend to dominate weekly athlete polls of this kind, because the voting window is short and the nominee list changes every week.

Because every nominee on this ballot is a high school student, this page follows the publisher's own practice of describing athletes by school, sport and performance rather than building the story around any individual child.

The dated history of this weekly series

Seven seasons of the YAIAA Girls Athlete of the Week are confirmed: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Within each season the program runs as a chain of weekly ballots rather than one season-long vote, and each ballot carries its own dated title. The 2024 ballot is titled for competitions from Oct. 28 to Nov. 2 and is marked closed, which places that week squarely in the middle of the fall girls sports calendar.

Several facts about the series' operation are absent from the ballot page. The exact opening and closing dates for each week's poll appear only in the poll title of that week. GameTimePA has not published a season schedule listing every weekly ballot in advance, and the dates of the next season's polls are not yet announced. The single authoritative source for any week's window is the live ballot itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the evidence does establish is durability. A weekly fan poll that has survived seven consecutive seasons, through the interrupted 2020 school year, is an established part of how GameTimePA covers YAIAA girls sports. For a supporter planning ahead, the practical pattern is that ballots cluster in the fall season weeks, matching when volleyball, tennis, soccer and cross country are in competition across the conference, and that each week's poll closes before the next one posts.

How a supporter votes this week

The mechanic on a live ballot is deliberately simple. A reader opens the current poll on Crowdsignal, sees the week's nominees listed with her school, her sport and what she did on the field to earn the nod, selects one, and submits. No account, email or payment step appears in the ballot flow, which is typical of the weekly athlete polls this publisher runs.

On frequency, GameTimePA's own guidance for these fan polls states that a reader can vote for her favorite as many times as she wishes. That instruction comes from the organizer's poll coverage rather than from a rules block on the ballot page, so any technical control the poll host applies in a given week is visible only on the live form.

Supporters who want a nominee to win generally treat the poll as a short sprint. Because each weekly ballot closes within days of posting, the useful window for rallying a school community is the same week the nomination appears. Sharing the exact poll link matters more than generic encouragement, since the URL changes from week to week as each new ballot is published on poll.fm.

One caution belongs here: every nominee is a minor, so outreach should stay inside normal school-community channels such as team group chats, athletic department posts and booster communications rather than anything a student would experience as pressure.

How this ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Within Pennsylvania's high school sports voting scene, this poll occupies a specific lane: girls athletics in the YAIAA conference, run by GameTimePA on Crowdsignal. Other sport ballots on this site answer to different publishers and wider geographies. The Mr. PA Football award covers football statewide, the PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week serves a different conference and a winter sport, and the Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year runs on a season-end rather than weekly cadence.

The closest structural cousin is the Morning Call Athlete of the Week, another publisher-run weekly fan poll in the same state, and the WICU Athlete of the Year shows the year-end format a weekly series can feed into. What distinguishes the YAIAA girls poll is its fixed conference footprint and its weekly rhythm through the fall, which means a school can appear on the ballot repeatedly within one season as different athletes post standout weeks.

For a supporter comparing ballots, the practical differences are the voting window length, the vote rules and the platform controls, and those belong to each organizer separately. Rules stated for one Pennsylvania poll never transfer to another, so anyone active in several of these votes should read each live ballot on its own terms.