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

Star Local Media Athlete of the Week — contest at a glance

Star Local Media's Athlete of the Week programme gives DFW-suburb prep athletes community-wide recognition through a free online fan poll published each week of the UIL high school sports calendar at starlocalmedia.com. The sports staff nominates up to six athletes from its coverage area, draws on coach submissions and original reporting, and then opens the poll for the full community to decide by popular vote.

• Organizer: Star Local Media — an independent community newspaper group with 14 publications across Collin, Denton, and Dallas counties, reaching more than 3.7 million users per year and serving more than 17 million content pages annually.
• Coverage footprint: Allen, Carrollton, Celina, Coppell, Flower Mound, Frisco, Lake Cities, Lewisville, Little Elm, McKinney, Mesquite, Plano, Prosper, Rowlett, and The Colony.
• Voting mechanics: one vote per device for the full window (no hourly reset), no account required, closes 10 a.m. Monday each week.
• Prize: published recognition on starlocalmedia.com and across the group's community social channels — a valued credential in one of Texas's most competitive prep sports regions.
• Seasons covered: fall (Aug–Nov), winter (Nov–Mar), and spring (Mar–Jun) UIL seasons; all sports, boys and girls.

Star Local Media is an independent community newspaper group — not a national chain — which means its Athlete of the Week poll draws from a tightly defined DFW suburban footprint rather than a metro-wide or statewide pool, making local community mobilisation the decisive competitive variable every week.

Which North Texas schools compete in the Star Local Media poll?

Star Local Media draws nominees from UIL-member high schools across its 14-community coverage area in Collin, Denton, and Dallas counties. The table below lists the 14 core schools most frequently in the nominee pool, with their UIL district or class and home city for the 2024-26 alignment cycle.

The poll's geographic core sits across two UIL district pairings. District 6-6A concentrates the Plano, Allen, McKinney, and Prosper programmes — some of the largest high school enrolments in Texas, with Plano ISD's three campuses (Senior, East, West) representing distinct communities within the same city. District 5-6A covers the Lewisville ISD corridor (Lewisville, Flower Mound, Marcus) plus Frisco Wakeland and Little Elm, filling out the Denton County and western Collin County portion of Star Local Media's footprint.

Frisco ISD operates multiple campuses at various UIL class levels; Reedy and Lone Star are Class 5A while Wakeland competes at 6A after the 2024 UIL realignment raised it based on enrolment. All Frisco ISD schools within the Star Local Media coverage area remain eligible for nomination regardless of UIL class. Coppell ISD and smaller-community schools in Carrollton, Celina, and Prosper are also within the coverage area and appear on ballots when athletes post standout individual performances.

How does the Star Local Media Athlete of the Week vote work?

The poll lives in the Athlete of the Week section at starlocalmedia.com and is free to participate in — no Star Local Media subscription, no account registration, and no personal data required. Each week's poll is published as a standalone article within the sports section, with the embedded vote widget listing up to six nominees by name, school, and sport. For a plain-English overview of how online newspaper fan polls function generally, see our guide to online contest voting.

What is the vote cap and how does the window run?

The Star Local Media format enforces one vote per device for the full polling window — not an hourly reset. That means a single phone, tablet, or laptop can cast one vote, not dozens spread across the week. The competitive implication is significant: breadth of reach across distinct devices matters more in this format than sustained per-device intensity. A household with three connected devices contributes three votes total, not hundreds.

The window opens after the sports staff has reviewed weekly UIL results and finalised the nominee list — often mid-week or by Friday — and closes at a fixed 10 a.m. Monday. That Monday-morning deadline means the entire weekend from Friday night through Sunday is the active mobilisation window, with no votes possible after 10 a.m. Monday regardless of the competitive situation at close.

The poll is accessible on all standard desktop and mobile browsers. Live vote counts are visible to all visitors throughout the window, letting supporters track standings in real time before the Monday close.

How is the Athlete of the Week winner selected?

The contest has two distinct phases: an editorial nomination stage controlled by the Star Local Media sports staff, and a fan-vote stage where reader participation alone determines the outcome.

1. Performance submission: coaches, parents, and school contacts submit weekly highlights to the Star Local Media sports desk — statistics, game context, and coach quotes are the most useful inputs.
2. Ballot selection: the sports staff reviews submissions and UIL results from across the coverage area, then selects up to six nominees for the week's poll based on editorial judgement about standout performances. Not every submitted athlete earns a ballot spot.
3. Fan vote opens: the poll goes live at starlocalmedia.com; any visitor can vote once per device at no cost, with live totals visible throughout the window until 10 a.m. Monday.
4. Winner announced: at close, the nominee with the highest vote total is named Athlete of the Week. There is no editorial override, no tie-breaking panel, and no secondary scoring — vote count is the sole determinant.

Reaching the ballot requires athletic merit evaluated by a professional sports staff; winning the ballot requires organised community engagement across Collin and Denton county networks. The two stages reward different skills — performance earns the nomination; mobilisation earns the award.

Building more votes for a Star Local Media Athlete of the Week nominee

Every Star Local Media vote campaign runs on the same structural math: the per-device cap means the final total equals the number of unique devices that voted, not the number of hours supporters spent voting. Reach across distinct devices is the controlling variable. Copy the active poll URL and get it in front of every realistic network as early as possible after the poll opens. For a full overview of how vote-building works across US newspaper fan polls, see our guide; the DFW-specific notes below cover what moves the needle in this market.

Which networks produce the most votes in the DFW suburbs?

Two DFW-suburb patterns consistently produce outsized results. First, Allen ISD and Plano ISD booster clubs maintain some of the largest organised parent lists in North Texas — a single booster email reaching 400 families on Friday evening can deliver hundreds of device-votes before Saturday morning. Second, Frisco and Flower Mound parent communities are highly active on neighbourhood Facebook groups and NextDoor, which convert well because parents in rapidly growing communities use local social media heavily for community coordination beyond sports.

When every organic network has been activated and a nominee is still trailing, some families and booster clubs use a paid real-voter promotion service to reach additional genuine supporters. If you consider that route, see our how-to guide for choosing a paced, cap-appropriate service — rapid-fire artificial injections produce patterns that platforms detect and remove.

Rules, the buy-votes question, and what the platform terms say

The Star Local Media Athlete of the Week is a community newspaper reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize, no formal sweepstakes structure, and no Texas prize-promotion regulatory framework. The relevant restrictions come from the poll platform's own technical terms — primarily prohibitions on automated tools that circumvent the per-device cap. For a broader discussion of how fan-poll legality works across US contests, see our main guide.

In any fan-poll context, there is a meaningful practical difference between two categories of activity:

• Automated scripts or bots — high-volume requests from the same device fingerprint or IP range that ignore the per-device cap. These violate standard poll platform terms, generate detectable traffic anomalies, and result in vote removal.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting genuine votes from their own devices within the standard per-device cap. Structurally, this is the same as a booster club email reaching five hundred additional families — it is fans voting, reached through a different channel.

Whether that distinction satisfies the spirit of Star Local Media's specific poll terms is a judgment each entrant must make independently after reading the current official poll page. The risk in a no-prize community newspaper fan poll is reputational within the school community, not legal.

Star Local Media Athlete of the Week — UIL season timeline

The programme covers all three UIL high school sports seasons in North Texas. The table below maps the poll cadence to the Texas UIL athletic calendar, showing which sports dominate nominations each period and the typical competitive intensity of the vote in each season.

The voting window follows a consistent weekly pattern: polls open after the Star Local Media sports staff reviews UIL results — often by Thursday or Friday — and close at 10 a.m. Monday. The weekend window is the active mobilisation period; final results appear on starlocalmedia.com Monday morning.

Fall is the most competitive season for this poll. October weeks featuring District 6-6A matchups — Allen vs. Plano or McKinney vs. Prosper — regularly produce vote totals well into the thousands as booster networks across Collin County mobilise in parallel. Spring track weeks, by contrast, can be decided with a few hundred votes when community mobilisation is lighter. Check the live leaderboard mid-window on the active poll to calibrate the competitive level of that specific week before deciding how much effort to invest.