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

What the YAIAA Girls Athlete of the Week Poll is and who runs it

Most athlete-of-the-week ballots in Pennsylvania cover one sport or one gender across an entire state. This program is built differently. The YAIAA Girls Athlete of the Week Poll is a girls-only, multi-sport honor run by YAIAA, and it recognizes individual weekly performances rather than a season-long player of the year. Where a program like Mr. PA Football crowns one football figure for the whole state, this ballot puts several girls athletes from different sports side by side in the same week and lets the public pick.

The vote is a plain public poll hosted on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), with the live ballot at https://poll.fm/15493967. The nominee lines on the latest ballot read like local sports coverage: each girl is named with her sport and a sentence on what she did, covering lacrosse, track and field and softball on that week's slate. The ballot is a recognition exercise, not a fundraiser or a business contest, and no purchase of any kind is part of casting a vote.

YAIAA, the conference behind the program, operates in Pennsylvania, and no city or county is attached to the ballot in the program's details, so the market is best described as the YAIAA footprint within the state rather than any single town.

The dated history: which editions ran and when the latest window fell

The edition history of the YAIAA Girls Athlete of the Week Poll covers 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2023, 2024 and 2025. That is nine confirmed years, and the gap between 2018 and 2023 is part of that history: the program did not run in every year of that span, at least as far as the confirmed list goes. The 2023 return after the gap makes the current run five years old as of 2025.

The most recent confirmed ballot is dated precisely. It is the YAIAA Girls Athlete of the Week Poll covering May 12-17, and the poll.fm page marks it Poll Closed. That closed notice is the current state of the ballot: voting on the May window is finished, and the page now documents that week's result rather than a live vote.

What YAIAA has not published is the shape of the next cycle. No opening date, closing date or nomination window for the next girls athlete ballot has been printed by YAIAA, and the method by which nominees are selected for any given week is likewise unstated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

One more dated note belongs here: 2026 is the next year a ballot would be expected given the annual pattern since 2023, but expectation is not confirmation, and no 2026 poll exists on the poll.fm address yet.

How a supporter votes on the YAIAA girls athlete ballot today

Voting takes little effort. A supporter loads the YAIAA ballot at https://poll.fm/15493967, reads the nominee lines, selects one girl and submits. Each nominee carries a short performance description naming her sport, so the choice is informed by what the athlete actually did that week rather than by name recognition alone. On the latest ballot those lines covered a lacrosse performance, a track and field result and a softball game, which gives a sense of how varied a single week's slate can be.

Right now the practical situation is that the May 12-17 poll is closed. The poll.fm page says so directly, and no substitute ballot is live at that address. Voting resumes when YAIAA posts the next girls athlete poll, which loads at the same URL.

Two rules a supporter might ask about are absent from the page. The ballot is silent on whether signing in is needed before voting, and it is silent on how frequently a single person may cast votes within one week. Neither silence is a rule in itself; the poll.fm form is the authority whenever a poll is actually open, and its behavior during a live window is the only reliable guide.

Because the ballot is a public vote with no entry fee and no purchase step, the barrier to participating is simply finding the window while it is open, which is why the closed notice on the current page matters more than any rule text.

How this ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Pennsylvania hosts many public-vote sports programs, and the YAIAA girls athlete poll is distinct from every one of them. Mr. PA Football is a statewide football honor. The PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week is a boys basketball weekly run by a news publisher. The Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week and the Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year are each single-sport programs, one weekly and one seasonal.

Two more neighbours round out the set: the Morning Call Athlete of the Week and the WICU Athlete of the Year. Each belongs to a different publisher with a separate ballot.

Against that field, the YAIAA program stands out on three axes. It is girls-only at a time when several of the neighbours center boys sports. It is multi-sport, putting a lacrosse midfielder, a track athlete and a softball hitter on the same slate, where the neighbours are single-sport by design. And it is anchored to YAIAA, a conference-level organizer, rather than to a statewide media brand, which keeps the nominee pool inside one athletic footprint instead of drawing from every district in Pennsylvania.

The practical difference for anyone voting is scope: this ballot is won inside a smaller, more engaged community, and a week's result reflects that community's turnout more than a statewide fanbase.

Strengthening support during a YAIAA girls athlete window

A weekly poll rewards speed and community reach more than anything else. The window is short, the ballot is a single page on poll.fm, and the nominee lines give supporters a concrete reason to share: a specific performance worth recognizing. The people most likely to vote are teammates, classmates, families and local followers of the sport involved, so a link passed through those channels during an open window does more work than any broad appeal.

Timing matters because the May 12-17 poll shows how quickly a week closes: the ballot went from live to Poll Closed inside days. Anyone rallying support for a future nominee should treat the open window as the whole campaign and front-load the push rather than saving it for a final day.

On outside help, YAIAA has published no rule for this ballot, which means the live form and any notice the organizer attaches to it are the only stated positions. The general tactics that suit a short public poll are collected in our votes guide, and the legality question around purchased support in polls of this kind is treated in our legality page. Both are general references, not YAIAA policy.