DFW Star Local Media High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The thing most DFW voters don't know about this poll

When DFW prep sports fans search for "athlete of the week vote," they almost always land on the SI / SBLive Dallas–North Texas page — the regional football ballot that covers Duncanville and South Oak Cliff, closes Monday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific, and only runs during football season. That poll gets the attention. Star Local Media's ballot runs quietly in the same metro, on a different schedule, covering different schools, for different sports — and most families whose athletes are actually eligible for it are not aware it exists.

The geography is the starting point. Star Local Media is not a metro-wide publication; it is a network of suburban DFW community papers — the Allen American, the Plano Star Courier, and related outlets covering the Collin and northern Dallas county suburbs. The schools in its coverage footprint are Allen, Frisco, McKinney, Plano, Flower Mound, Little Elm, Lovejoy, Coppell, Rowlett, Mesquite, Lewisville, and Sachse, among others. A student-athlete at Duncanville or South Oak Cliff does not appear here. A student-athlete at McKinney Boyd or Frisco Panther Creek does — and is competing on a 5-name ballot against four other suburban programs rather than against the entire North Texas football ecosystem.

The practical effect of that narrower field is underappreciated. A 5-nominee ballot concentrates the race in a way a 15-nominee or 25-nominee statewide ballot does not. Vote-splitting is lower, community-level turnout moves the share faster, and the winning margin is likely driven by whichever school's booster network was most organized that week — not by which program has the highest enrollment in the state.

What is confirmed and what is not

Because Star Local Media's site returned access errors during research, individual nominee names and per-week vote totals from recent polls are not documented here. That is a real gap, and it is worth stating clearly rather than papering over it. What is confirmed comes from search coverage and secondary sources, and it is enough to describe how this poll works:

• The poll is a genuine fan vote: the outlet has confirmed in published text that "it comes down to a fan vote to decide who is named Athlete of the Week."
• The close is Monday. Confirmed times include 7 p.m. Monday (February 2025) and 10 a.m. Monday in at least one other week — the exact cutoff varies.
• The field is 5–6 nominees per week, drawn from the suburban DFW coverage area.
• Schools confirmed in coverage: Allen, Frisco Memorial, Frisco Panther Creek, Prosper Walnut Grove, McKinney Boyd, Flower Mound, Little Elm, Lovejoy, Coppell, Rowlett, Mesquite, Lewisville, Sachse, John Paul II.
• Sports confirmed: football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer, wrestling, swimming, track, lacrosse — year-round.
• Vote cap: not stated in any accessible article. Treat as unconfirmed.

The absence of confirmed nominee names is different from a poll not being real. Families whose athletes have appeared on this ballot can verify their specific week's results through the hub at starlocalmedia.com/sports/athleteoftheweek/ or by searching for past coverage in the publication's archive.

Monday close and why the timing matters in the suburban corridor

The Star Local Media ballot closes Monday, and so does the SI regional Dallas–North Texas football poll. The similarity ends there. SI's football ballot runs to 11:59 p.m. Pacific — nearly midnight DFW time. Star Local Media's confirmed close times have been substantially earlier: 7 p.m. Monday in February 2025, and 10 a.m. in at least one other week. That is a much shorter active window, and it changes the campaign arithmetic.

In the suburban DFW corridor where these schools sit, Monday at 7 p.m. means the window closes before Monday evening settles in — before the after-dinner social media check, before the second wave of parents get home from work. An organized school booster that posts the poll link Monday morning and again at lunch is likely reaching the audience before many casual supporters have even seen the ballot. The schools that win here are almost certainly the ones that treat Monday as a whole-day task rather than a Monday-night sprint.

The year-round cadence also creates a different kind of community rhythm than a football-only poll. Allen and Frisco families who followed the football ballot in October may not think to look for a basketball or wrestling version in February. The poll keeps running; community awareness of it does not always keep pace. A school that makes it a habit — posting the link every week their athlete is nominated, building an audience that knows to look on Sundays — accumulates an advantage over a school that rediscovers the poll from scratch each time.

Running a real campaign in the Allen–Frisco–McKinney corridor

The schools in this poll's footprint are clustered in one of the fastest-growing suburban corridors in the country. Allen, Frisco, McKinney, and Prosper have added tens of thousands of residents in the past decade; their high school programs reflect that — large student bodies, active booster organizations, and parent networks that live on group chats and neighborhood Facebook groups. That infrastructure exists whether or not the athletic department has thought to use it for a fan vote.

The Lovejoy Leopards and John Paul II Cardinals sit in a different category: smaller and private-school communities, respectively, where the network is more centralized. A Lovejoy nominee on a 5-name ballot against an Allen or Frisco program is a case where the smaller community's tighter activation can offset the enrollment gap — similar to how Brock or Gunter compete against Duncanville on the SI football ballot, except the field here is already suburban-narrowed rather than statewide-wide.

The mechanics of running a campaign here are straightforward: get the poll link from the week's article, share it through every channel before the Monday cutoff, and confirm the exact close time from the article before you assume it runs to midnight. For a 5-name ballot with a tight Monday window, vote-support campaigns calibrated to a small field can move the standings faster than the same effort spread across a 25-nominee statewide ballot. More on how fan-poll campaigns work for suburban weeklies is in the how-to guide; more Texas contests are at /usa/texas/, and the full national directory is at /usa/. For specifically sport-targeted support, see sports fan-poll vote support.