WJHL Tri-Cities Play of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The mix-up almost every first-time voter makes here

This is not an athlete vote. That single distinction trips up more first-time visitors than anything about the deadline. WJHL's Play of the Week ballot rewards one specific play, a catch, a run, a defensive stop, pulled from that week's Tri-Cities games, and it runs as its own contest separate from any athlete-of-the-week recognition the station's sports section might also carry. Vote for the wrong ballot and the support does not count toward the one your favorite program actually needs.

WJHL does not publish a running vote count or a margin at any point during the week, so there is no scoreboard to check Tuesday or Wednesday to see who is ahead. What is confirmed, plainly, on the organizer's own page: voting opens once that week's games conclude, closes Monday at noon, and the field is capped at one vote per hour per user. Then the winning play airs on the station's 4 p.m. broadcast, hours after the ballot itself has already closed.

That gap between the noon close and the 4 p.m. reveal is easy to misjudge. A supporter who plans a Monday-afternoon push, timed around the broadcast, has already missed the window entirely. The hourly cap changes the math too. One browser cannot flood the total, so the campaigns that hold up here are the ones with real people coming back on the clock, not a single burst of clicking Sunday night. The general mechanics of pacing a real-turnout campaign against a capped, resetting clock are covered in the online vote-buying guide.

Why a Tennessee/Virginia border market runs its own play vote

WJHL is a Nexstar-owned ABC affiliate, and its Play of the Week sits inside the station's high school sports coverage rather than as a syndicated SI/SBLive product. That matters because a locally produced ballot answers to the station's own newsroom, not a national poll template. The Monday-noon close and the hourly cap are WJHL's own rules, not a format shared across every market Nexstar covers.

The Tri-Cities footprint itself is the other structural fact worth naming. WJHL's coverage runs across the Tennessee/Virginia state line, pulling from Sullivan and Washington County programs on the Tennessee side alongside counterpart conferences in Southwest Virginia. A play from either side of that border can land in the same weekly field, which is a different shape than a single-state ballot. A fan base in Bristol, Tennessee, and a fan base in Bristol, Virginia, are functionally the same media market voting on the same play, even though they sit in two different states with two different governing bodies (TSSAA on one side, VHSL on the other). Neither body has any stake in the outcome; this is strictly a broadcast promotion layered on top of real games.

See how a Sunday-close, statewide SI ballot runs by comparison at Tennessee's statewide Football Player of the Week, and how a different East Tennessee weekly format handles its own deadline at Tennessee's Athlete of the Week. Both are separate contests from WJHL's play-specific ballot, run by different organizers on different clocks.

Pacing a campaign against an hourly reset instead of a single deadline

A one-vote-per-hour cap changes what actually works here compared to an unlimited poll. There is no ceiling to hit once and walk away from. The opportunity resets every sixty minutes for as long as the ballot stays open, from the moment that week's games end through Monday at noon. A push concentrated entirely in one sitting Sunday night caps out fast and then goes flat for the rest of the week unless the same supporters come back.

What that means practically: reminders spaced across Sunday night, Monday morning, and the final stretch before noon do more than a single blast, because each reminder is really asking the same person to use a fresh hourly slot rather than asking for a one-time click. A school's team parent group, a booster page, or a coach's social account that sends two or three spaced nudges across that window gives real supporters more chances to return than one message ever could.

For campaigns that need turnout beyond what an organic network can sustain hour after hour, structured fan poll vote support is built for exactly this kind of capped, resetting ballot. Confirm WJHL's current rules on the live page first, since the organizer controls the cap and the close time and can adjust either. Broader guidance on running a real-turnout push across a multi-day window sits at the how-to hub. More Tennessee contests are catalogued at the Tennessee contest hub, part of the full USA contest directory.