WLTX Columbia Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing that separates this ballot from every other one in the state

A newsroom runs this vote. Not a newspaper's digital desk, not a magazine platform's editorial team — a television station. WLTX News19, the Tegna-owned CBS affiliate that serves Columbia and the Midlands, posts its Player of the Week ballot at wltx.com/player-of-the-week and reports the outcome through its own newscast during the football season. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it changes who controls every part of the process: the nominee field, the voting window, the rules, and the announcement all sit inside one broadcast newsroom's workflow rather than a syndicated wire product shared across dozens of markets.

Here's the honest limitation. WLTX hasn't published a running vote count, a percentage split, or a searchable archive of past winners for this program — at least not anywhere we could confirm. So there's no scoreboard to check mid-week, and there's no back catalog to browse for context on how competitive a typical week runs. That's a real gap in the public record, and it's worth stating plainly rather than inventing a number to fill it. What that gap means practically: the current live page at wltx.com is the only source that matters. Not a cached screenshot, not a rival station's recap, not last season's format.

So treat every week as a fresh read of the rules. A station can adjust a voting tool's cap, close time, or nominee count between weeks without much fanfare, and there's no confirmed standing document locking those terms in place. What is confirmed: it's free, it doesn't require an account, and Columbia-area football is the subject. Everything past that belongs to whatever WLTX's page says this week.

How a TV-station ballot behaves differently than a newspaper or magazine one

South Carolina already has two other confirmed fan-vote football programs on the record, and neither one looks like WLTX's. The Greenville News Athlete of the Week runs out of a Gannett newspaper's digital sports desk, covers the Upstate counties around Spartanburg and Anderson, and enforces a published one-vote-per-device-per-hour cap. The statewide South Carolina High School Football Player of the Week, run by High School on SI / SBLive, pulls roughly fifteen nominees from across the entire state each week, keeps every tally hidden until the next article posts, and closes every Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. Both are real, both are confirmed, and neither one is WLTX.

WLTX sits apart from both. It's a broadcast station's own promotional and community-engagement tool tied to a Columbia/Midlands audience rather than a print subscriber base or a nationwide sports-media vertical. The ballot's reach is naturally narrower geographically — Richland and Lexington county programs, and the wider Midlands footprint the station's signal covers — but the organizer has a direct, daily on-air relationship with that audience that a statewide magazine poll simply doesn't have. A viewer who watches WLTX's 6 p.m. sportscast already knows the anchor's name; that's a different kind of trust than clicking a link inside a national sports-media article.

None of that changes what the station has and hasn't made public. No per-hour cap is confirmed the way Greenville's is. No Sunday-night close is confirmed the way SI's is. The single reliable fact is the URL: wltx.com/player-of-the-week, checked fresh, every week.

Why Columbia and the Midlands are a market of their own

Columbia sits roughly a hundred miles from Greenville and even farther from the coastal Lowcountry, and the Midlands region — Richland and Lexington counties at its core, with the wider WLTX viewing area stretching into surrounding counties — runs its own SCHSL rivalries independent of anything happening in the Upstate or on the coast. A program that WLTX features one Friday doesn't compete for attention with a Spartanburg or Anderson school on the Greenville News ballot; the audiences barely overlap. That's the practical case for a Midlands-specific fan vote existing at all instead of readers simply defaulting to a statewide poll.

A parent, coach, or booster club in the Columbia area has a fair question worth asking before assuming anything: does WLTX's page currently list a nomination contact, and does this week's ballot include a program from Richland, Lexington, or a neighboring Midlands county? The station's live page is the only place with a real answer. South Carolina's statewide football poll and the statewide Athlete of the Week both run separately and won't reflect a WLTX-only result, so check the right page for the right claim.

For a genuinely open, human-turnout ballot like this one, sports fan-poll vote support and the broader fan poll voting service are both built around real people voting within whatever window an organizer sets — always confirmed against WLTX's own current terms first, since the station, not a third party, decides the cap and the close. General mechanics for this style of open fan vote are covered in the online vote-buying guide. Every other South Carolina program we track sits at the South Carolina contest hub, part of the full USA contest directory.