Public Opinion Athlete of the Week Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Public Opinion Athlete of the Week Poll is and who runs it

Run by Public Opinion, a South Dakota newspaper, this award program invites readers each week during the sports season to pick a winner from a shortlist of standout high school performances in the paper's coverage area. The vertical is school sport, and the mechanic is a straight public vote: whichever option collects the most support when the round closes wins the week.

The ballot is hosted on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm service carries the voting form. The voting address for the most recent confirmed round is https://poll.fm/15594046, and that page is where a supporter lands to vote. Crowdsignal supplies the voting form and the running results display; the newspaper supplies the nominees and promotes the round.

Facts at a glance

Since the nominees are high school students, the ballot is described here by sport and result rather than by naming the young people on it. The newspaper's own coverage is where the nominees are introduced each week.

The dated record for this poll

Two seasons of the series are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. The evidence behind those seasons is a set of 30 ballots harvested from the poll.fm host across the two years, which is what marks the program as a recurring weekly feature rather than a one-off contest. The series is expected to continue in 2026, though no ballot for that year is dated here.

The one individually dated round is the 2-8 June ballot, which is marked closed on the poll page. That round is the voting URL quoted throughout this page, and its results display showed the leading option drawing a five-figure vote total. The June window sits inside the 2025 season.

Public Opinion has not printed the dates of the next round, the full structure of categories beyond the weekly athlete frame, or any per-supporter vote limit on the poll page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The start and end dates of future weekly rounds, and any nomination rules that sit ahead of the vote, are likewise absent from the page that hosts the poll.

For a supporter, the practical reading is simple: the series is real and recurring, the 2-8 June round is finished, and the next open ballot will appear at the same poll.fm address when the paper publishes it.

How a supporter votes in the current round

The mechanic asks very little of the voter. A supporter opens the poll.fm ballot, reads the list of options, selects the radio button beside one athlete or team and submits. Crowdsignal logs the choice at once and the results display updates to show each option's share. No account, no login and no payment sit between the supporter and the vote on the page as published.

The 2-8 June ballot showed how the results display works in practice: every option carried a percentage and a raw vote count, so the running total was visible while the round was live. Once the round closed, the page kept the final figures but stopped accepting votes, which is why the current URL shows a closed state rather than an open form.

Because the series is weekly, the same three actions repeat for every new ballot: open the page, choose one option, submit. What changes from week to week is only the nominee list, which the paper draws from that week's results across the sports it covers.

One caution belongs here. The poll page publishes no statement about how frequently a single supporter may vote within a round, so a supporter who plans to return repeatedly should follow whatever the live form permits in that round rather than assume a rule carried over from a previous week.

How this poll sits beside its South Dakota neighbours

South Dakota readers have several public-vote programs to choose from, and this poll is the weekly sports entry among them. Its closest sibling is the Argus Leader Athlete of the Week, a similar reader-voted award from the state's largest newspaper, and the Public Opinion-Aberdeen News Athlete of the Week, which shares this poll's publisher family.

The best-of programs are a different shape. The statewide best-of ballot run by the magazine publisher, Best of Mitchell, CommunityVotes Rapid City and CommunityVotes Sioux Falls all ask voters to pick favourite local businesses across many categories, usually on an annual cycle.

What makes this poll different is tempo and subject. It runs weekly during the season, it honours individual student athletes rather than businesses, and each round closes within days of opening. A business considering a push in any of these programs should match its effort to the ballot it is actually on, because a weekly sports poll and a months-long best-of contest reward very different rhythms of support.

Strengthening support in a weekly reader poll

A weekly poll rewards speed. Because each round closes within days, the useful window for rallying support is the few days between the ballot opening and closing, not a long campaign. Share the poll.fm link the day the round opens, point it at the nominee's teammates, school community and local sports pages, and ask each person to vote once and pass the link on.

The organizer publishes no rule about outside help, so the safe position is the one the ballot itself supports: real people, voting through the public form, during the open window. Anything that floods a small weekly poll with irregular activity risks the result being questioned, and the paper has given no assurance it would honour such votes.

For a fuller picture of what works in reader polls of this kind, our guide to getting more votes covers outreach that fits a short-window ballot, and award vote support explains the options for award-style ballots generally.