Public Opinion-Aberdeen News Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing most readers miss about this ballot

Two competing newspapers publish the exact same poll. That is the part visitors usually don't clock. The Watertown Public Opinion and the Aberdeen American News are separate mastheads, both under the Gannett / USA TODAY Network umbrella, and rather than run rival athlete-of-the-week programs they fold their nominee pools into one shared ballot. Vote on aberdeennews.com or thepublicopinion.com: it's the same poll, the same nominees, the same Sunday-midnight close either way.

So the coverage footprint is bigger than either city alone. A reader in Watertown sees athletes from Aberdeen-area schools on the ballot, and vice versa. That's unusual for a local sports poll. Most papers in this format run their own city's kids only. Readers comparing how other state fan-vote programs handle a shared masthead setup won't find many direct parallels; it's a structural quirk specific to this joint SD market.

What the confirmed nominee record shows, and what it doesn't

Here's the honest gap: neither paper keeps a public standings archive. What we can confirm comes from following the weekly sports coverage itself, and 2025-26 winners on record include a softball nominee from Deuel (Clear Lake), a boys basketball nominee from Groton, and a girls basketball nominee from Great Plains Lutheran in Watertown. Three towns. Three school sizes. Three different sports inside one winter-to-spring stretch.

No published vote totals, no margin data, no season-long leaderboard: that's the trade-off of a smaller joint-market poll versus a statewide program like the South Dakota High School Player of the Year. What the record does confirm is spread: no single host city has swept a season. Great Plains Lutheran, a private school with an enrollment nowhere near Aberdeen Central's, has produced a winner in the same window as the two host districts.

How the mechanics differ from the SI-network standard

Most South Dakota prep polls readers encounter run on the High School on SI template (single publication, single city, embedded widget with a published cap). This one doesn't fit that mold.

No app, no login wall, no per-hour throttle disclosed anywhere on the page. The nominee field itself rotates by season: volleyball and football nominees in the fall, basketball and wrestling in winter, track and softball once spring hits. A supporter following this poll across a full school year watches the entire SDHSAA sport calendar cycle through one shared ballot, not a single-sport program repeating itself. The related South Dakota High School Athlete of the Week poll runs a comparable weekly cadence under different organisers, if a side-by-side is useful.

What past winners tell you about mobilizing here

Deuel School District runs a few hundred students total. Groton Area isn't much bigger. Neither had any business outproducing Aberdeen or Watertown readership on paper, and yet both produced a confirmed winner in the same season. That's the tell.

A small district where the team is the town's Friday-night anchor turns out a higher share of its own readers than a bigger city where sports attention splits across three or four programs at once. The Sunday-midnight close rewards exactly that kind of concentrated, repeatable turnout over one big Sunday spike. A message naming the nominee, their school, and the actual deadline, sent Sunday afternoon while the window is still open, not Monday morning, reaches people while they can still act. For the mechanics of building that kind of steady push toward a fixed weekly close, see how online vote campaigns are structured, or browse fan-poll vote support built around this exact close-day pattern.