Knoxville News Sentinel Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Knoxville News Sentinel Athlete of the Week?

The Knoxville News Sentinel Athlete of the Week is a free public fan poll published each week of the Tennessee prep sports calendar at knoxnews.com, operated under the paper's PrepXtra high school sports brand. The News Sentinel — a Gannett regional daily within the USA TODAY Network — has covered East Tennessee prep sports for more than a century, and PrepXtra is the dedicated prep content vertical that aggregates game recaps, stats, feature profiles, and the weekly fan vote for the region's student-athletes.

• Hosted on knoxnews.com within the PrepXtra / High School Sports section — no separate app or login required.
• Nominees are selected by the News Sentinel sports desk based on performance submissions from coaches, athletic directors, and school contacts across East Tennessee.
• The poll runs across all three TSSAA sports seasons — fall, winter, and spring — covering every sport the TSSAA sanctions at the prep level.
• Vote cap: one vote per device per hour, enforced automatically by the Gannett poll widget; no registration or email address needed.
• Winners earn published recognition on knoxnews.com, in PrepXtra social media posts, and in News Sentinel sports coverage — a searchable Gannett byline that carries weight on recruiting profiles.
• The Knoxville metro is home to some of Tennessee's most decorated prep programmes, with TSSAA state championships distributed across Knox, Blount, and Anderson counties each year.

A PrepXtra Athlete of the Week win puts the athlete's name on a Gannett digital property indexed by every major search engine — directly visible to college coaches and recruiters searching East Tennessee standouts.

Which East Tennessee schools compete in this PrepXtra poll?

The Knoxville News Sentinel draws nominees from TSSAA member schools across Knox County and the surrounding East Tennessee counties — a geography spanning urban Knoxville city schools, the suburban Knox County ring, and the Blount County programmes that perennially compete at the state level. The table below lists the programmes most frequently in the nominee pool, organized by location and notable sports strengths.

The geographic spread in this poll is significant. Blount County schools — Maryville and Alcoa — sit 15 to 20 miles south of Knoxville city proper and carry enormous prep sports prestige. When a Maryville or Alcoa athlete is nominated, the Blount County community (population roughly 135,000) mobilises separately from the Knox County base, often producing some of the poll's highest weekly totals. Anderson County's Oak Ridge adds another distinct community — the tight-knit national laboratory workforce town has a culture of organised civic engagement that transfers directly to fan vote campaigns.

How does the Knoxville News Sentinel PrepXtra Athlete of the Week vote work?

Voting lives inside the High School Sports section at knoxnews.com and costs nothing — no Knoxville News Sentinel subscription, no account, and no personal data entry of any kind. The Gannett poll widget renders on the page showing each nominee's name, school, sport, and a continuously updating vote tally. For a broader explanation of how online newspaper fan polls like this operate across the USA TODAY Network, the buy-votes-online guide covers the mechanics in full.

The platform limits each device to one vote per hour. A phone, a home laptop, and a school-issued tablet in the same household each register as independent voting surfaces — casting three votes in the first hour and three more each subsequent hour across the full window. The hourly cap resets automatically; no re-confirmation step is required after the cooldown expires.

The poll typically opens Monday or Tuesday after the News Sentinel sports desk reviews weekend and early-week results, then closes on Friday afternoon. The exact close time is displayed on the widget itself at knoxnews.com — verify it there, because the desk adjusts for TSSAA tournament scheduling and holidays without advance notice on general pages.

Voting works across all standard mobile and desktop browsers. The poll is geographically unrestricted — extended family in Chattanooga, Nashville, or out of state can vote for an East Tennessee nominee just as easily as a Knox County neighbour. That out-of-market reach is worth building into your contact strategy.

How is the PrepXtra Athlete of the Week winner chosen?

The winner is the nominee with the highest vote count when the poll closes — a pure popular-vote outcome with no editorial panel weighting or scoring modifier. The Knoxville News Sentinel sports desk applies editorial judgement only at the nomination stage.

1. Performance submission: coaches, parents, and athletic contacts send outstanding game performances to the News Sentinel sports desk, typically by email, covering results from the prior weekend and early week. PrepXtra staff also pull from box scores and game recaps already in the system.
2. Editorial ballot curation: the sports desk selects the weekly nominee list. Appearing on the ballot is itself recognition — not every submitted performance earns a spot, and the desk balances across sports, genders, and geographic areas within East Tennessee.
3. Open poll: the poll goes live at knoxnews.com, usually Monday or Tuesday, and runs until the Friday close time shown on the widget. Vote totals are visible live throughout the window.
4. Winner announced: after close, PrepXtra publishes the winner on knoxnews.com and across the News Sentinel's social media channels. The recognition appears in PrepXtra digital newsletters and can surface in the print sports section.

Because the outcome is pure fan vote, the athlete's support network — not the editorial board — determines the winner, and a well-organised community can win over a statistically superior nominee from a school with weaker digital mobilisation.

How do you get more votes for a Knoxville News Sentinel Athlete of the Week nominee?

Every vote strategy for this poll works the same hourly-cap arithmetic: maximise the number of devices voting, spread the effort consistently across the full window, and activate every realistic network before the Friday close. The market-specific tactics below reflect what actually moves the needle in East Tennessee. For the generic vote-building playbook that applies to all online newspaper polls, read our how-to guide.

East Tennessee community mobilisation patterns

Two East Tennessee patterns produce outsized results. First, the Blount County Maryville–Alcoa rivalry dynamic: both schools have compact, intensely loyal communities, and when either is on the ballot, the Blount County voting base activates with notable speed. Maryville's football tradition — and the community identity built around it — creates alumni engagement that extends well beyond current student families.

Second, the Catholic High School of Knoxville alumni network behaves differently from large public schools: it is smaller but more concentrated and faster to respond because former students stay closely connected through parish and school associations across the metro area.

When every organic network has been reached and the nominee is still trailing, some families and booster clubs use a paid vote promotion service to reach additional genuine voters. If that is the approach, choose a service that delivers paced, real votes matched to the hourly cap — rapid-fire requests that ignore the cooldown are detectable and removed. The sports fan poll votes service is designed around exactly this delivery model.

What are the rules, and can you buy votes for this poll?

The Knoxville News Sentinel Athlete of the Week is a reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize and no Tennessee prize-promotion regulatory framework. The relevant constraints come from the Gannett poll platform's own technical terms — primarily prohibitions on automated tools that circumvent the hourly device cap. For a thorough, balanced analysis of legality across online contest polls generally, the buy-votes-online guide goes deeper than what fits here.

The meaningful practical line is between two different activities:

• Automated bot scripts — rapid-fire requests from the same device fingerprint or IP block that ignore the one-hour cooldown. These violate standard Gannett poll terms, produce anomalous traffic patterns that the platform's fraud detection is tuned to catch, and result in those votes being stripped from the tally.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting genuine votes within the hourly cap from their own devices. Structurally this is identical to a booster club email that reaches four hundred additional families — it is fans voting, reached through a paid channel rather than an organic one.

Whether that distinction satisfies the spirit of a particular week's poll terms is a judgement each family or booster club must make after reviewing the current official page at knoxnews.com. The stakes in this format — a newspaper fan poll with no prize and no formal contest law structure — are reputational rather than legal. That trade-off is worth weighing honestly.

When does Athlete of the Week voting open and close on PrepXtra?

The PrepXtra poll follows the TSSAA's three-season structure. Each season brings a different mix of sports, a different set of likely nominees, and different competitive intensity in the voting window. The table below maps the programme to the Tennessee high school athletic year.

Within each weekly cycle, the poll typically opens on Monday or Tuesday after the News Sentinel sports desk processes weekend results, and closes on Friday afternoon. The widget at knoxnews.com displays the exact close time — verify there each week, as the desk adjusts for TSSAA tournament and holiday scheduling.

Fall is the most competitive voting season. Weeks when Maryville or Alcoa nominees appear alongside major Knox County programmes can produce total vote counts in the thousands. Spring weeks for individual sports like tennis or golf — with narrower community bases — often settle at several hundred votes. Checking the live leaderboard midway through a particular week's window is the clearest way to calibrate how aggressive your mobilisation needs to be.

For context on East Tennessee's broader contest landscape and how the Knox County market fits into statewide polling, see the Tennessee contest guide. For all US-market guides, the USA index covers every state.