Argus Leader Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot, not two, and that's easy to miss from Sioux Falls

Search "Argus Leader Athlete of the Week" from Sioux Falls and it looks, at first glance, like there should be a dedicated local page. There isn't. The Argus Leader runs a single Athlete of the Week ballot inside its High School Sports section at argusleader.com/sports/high-school/, and that one poll covers the paper's entire South Dakota footprint. Sioux Falls and the surrounding Eastern SD suburbs show up on the ballot constantly, not because a second, city-specific vote exists somewhere else, but because that's where a large share of the Argus Leader's own readers live.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to find the "real" page. There is no separate URL for a Sioux Falls-only edition. The High School Sports section is the destination every week: game coverage, schedules, and the current Athlete of the Week ballot sitting alongside each other rather than split across different pages. Bookmark the section, not a search result, since the specific ballot article changes weekly while the section address doesn't.

Framing it this way up front avoids a real mistake: treating this as some smaller, separate Sioux Falls contest and missing that it's the same statewide Gannett ballot the rest of South Dakota also votes on. For the mechanics of building real turnout on a poll like this one, see the online vote-buying guide.

Three South Dakota polls, three different clocks, easy to mix up

South Dakota runs more than one Athlete of the Week-style ballot, and confusing them costs a campaign real time. The Watertown Public Opinion and Aberdeen American News jointly run their own weekly poll for northeastern South Dakota, closing Sunday at midnight, a different newsroom and a different coverage footprint entirely from the Argus Leader's. Meanwhile, South Dakota's Player of the Year award is annual, football-only, run by High School on SI/SBLive at si.com, and decided weeks after the November state championships. The Argus Leader's High School Sports section poll shares none of that infrastructure; it's weekly, all-sport, and closes Friday nights.

Four Sioux Falls public schools sit inside the same ballot pool most weeks: Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, and O'Gorman. That's not one city competing with itself so much as four separate alumni and parent networks that can each end up backing a different nominee in the same week, splitting the metro's total attention four ways. Harrisburg, Brandon Valley, and Tea Area add a fast-growing suburban ring on top of that four-school core, and none of it is capped to the metro; a program from further out in the Argus Leader's coverage area is on equal footing once nominated.

What that means for a campaign: a Sioux Falls nominee going up against a rival Sioux Falls school in the same week faces a fundamentally different math problem than one running against a nominee from a smaller Eastern SD town. When the whole metro's attention splits across two or three schools at once, a smaller program's tighter, more unified network sometimes closes the gap that raw enrollment numbers alone would predict.

What the section page actually shows, and what a Friday close means in practice

The poll widget inside the High School Sports section lists the current nominee's name, school, sport, and a short line on the performance behind the nomination, with a live vote count visible to anyone checking the page. Checking the page and voting takes about the same effort as reading a game recap.

Friday at 11:59 p.m. is the hard boundary. The section typically rolls over to the following week's nominee field not long after, so a vote cast Saturday morning lands on a ballot that's already closed. A reminder sent Thursday night, naming the Friday cutoff specifically rather than a vague "vote soon," reaches supporters while there's still a real window left to act.

The device-based session cap follows the same pattern used across Gannett's other Athlete of the Week polls in the state: a phone and a laptop in the same house each register separately, and the exact number resets on its own schedule. Since the rule sits on the live widget rather than in any fixed published policy, checking the current week's page beats assuming last month's cap still applies. For a broader look at how the statewide version of this same ballot behaves across a full SDHSAA season, see South Dakota's Athlete of the Week guide, and for a poll run by an entirely different pair of newsrooms in the state's northeast corner, see the Public Opinion-Aberdeen News Athlete of the Week. For general fan-poll mechanics, fan poll voting support covers ground that applies here too. The wider South Dakota slate sits at the South Dakota contest hub, part of the full USA contest directory.