Lubbock a-J Male Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Lubbock A-J Male Athlete of the Week poll is

Each week, the Lubbock A-J Male Athlete of the Week names one male high school athlete in the Lubbock, Texas market. The organizer is the Lubbock A-J, the city's daily newspaper, and balloting runs on Crowdsignal, the platform behind the poll.fm links. The current ballot lives at poll.fm/15399773, and since the series produces a new poll most weeks, that address serves the latest ballot in the sequence rather than a permanent single poll.

Contrast is the fastest way to place this program. Several Texas athlete and player votes sit on the same public-vote model, but most of the sibling programs operate at a wider sweep: the Austin American-Statesman Athlete of the Week carries a state capital's readership, the Dallas / North Texas High School Football Player of the Week is tied to one sport across a metro region, and the Dave Campbell's Texas Football Quarterback of the Year is a season-long statewide honor. The Lubbock poll is narrower by design: one city, one gender, one week at a time.

That narrowness shapes the vote itself. A weekly ballot in a single market draws totals in the tens of thousands at most, and the closed ballot in this series recorded 19,658 votes. Nominees come from high schools in Lubbock and nearby towns the paper covers, including Seminole, Plainview, Littlefield, Brownfield and Slaton.

The dated record: seasons, weekly rhythm and what is unpublished

Three seasons of the series are confirmed: 2023, 2024 and 2025. The program is annual, and the calendar inside each season runs from September through April, which tracks the Texas high school sports year from fall football through spring sports. Within that window the series is weekly, so a single season holds many separate ballots rather than one long vote.

The most concrete dated fact on the ballot itself comes from the closing poll at poll.fm/15399773. That ballot is marked closed, it drew 19,658 total votes, and the leading nominee finished with 63 percent of the vote, a margin that shows how concentrated support can be in a weekly field of three nominees. The page title carries the label Poll Closed, which is how the platform marks a finished week.

Two things about the series go unprinted by the organizer. The exact opening and closing times of each new weekly ballot are not announced in advance, and Lubbock A-J has not published a list of the award categories its weekly ballots cover, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The weekly nomination cutoff is the exception: the paper states that it accepts nominations each week until noon Sunday, which is the one timing rule printed in plain language.

The practical takeaway for anyone planning support: the season shape is predictable, the week-to-week timing is not. Anyone building a campaign around a specific athlete should watch for the new ballot rather than assume a fixed launch hour.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Voting is deliberately simple. The supporter opens the live poll.fm ballot, reads the short nominee list for the week, selects one male athlete, and submits the Crowdsignal form. No registration step, login or payment sits between the reader and the vote button, which is typical of newspaper polls hosted on that platform. Once the week closes, the page converts to a results view showing each nominee's share and the total votes cast.

The nomination side matters as much as the voting side. The Lubbock A-J accepts nominations each week until noon Sunday, so an athlete who is not on the current ballot can still reach the following week's field if the paper receives a nomination before that cutoff. For a school community, that noon Sunday deadline is the pivot of the whole week: nominations after it wait for the next cycle, and support built before it carries into a fresh poll.

Since every week brings its own poll, momentum does not carry over automatically. A strong finish in one week's ballot does nothing for the next week's count, so a school community that wants repeat recognition has to re-mobilize every time a new nominee list appears. That is the structural difference between this series and a season-long award, and it is why the weekly rhythm, not the season window, is what a supporter actually works against.

How this ballot sits beside its Texas siblings

The sibling programs listed alongside this one make the contrast concrete. The DFW Star Local Media High School Athlete of the Week serves its own metro readership through a local media group, the CenTex High School Football Player of the Week is football-only within its own region, and the East Texas High School Football Player of the Week serves a broad regional footprint. Each program answers to a separate publisher, and each runs its own ballot, so a vote cast in one counts only in that poll.

What marks the Lubbock poll as different is the combination of scale and frequency. It is a single-city, single-gender, weekly award, run by the city's own newspaper, on a platform that resets the nominee list every week. A metro-wide or statewide sibling accumulates larger totals over longer windows; the Lubbock poll compresses the same competitive energy into a seven-day sprint with a small nominee field, which is why its closing totals, 19,658 votes on the closed ballot, are meaningful for a market of Lubbock's size.

For a reader comparing Texas programs, the choice follows the athlete's situation. A Lubbock-area athlete belongs in this poll; a football player in the North Texas series belongs there; a quarterback with statewide ambitions belongs in the Dave Campbell's vote. The nomination cutoff of noon Sunday each week is the local detail that decides when a Lubbock campaign can begin.

Building support within this poll's weekly rhythm

This series rewards early starts. The nomination cutoff of noon Sunday means the effective campaign week runs from Sunday afternoon to the poll's close, and the small nominee field means a few hundred organized voters can decide the outcome, as the 63 percent winning share on the closed ballot suggests. Post the poll.fm link straight to the school community, ask supporters to return and vote again where the ballot permits, and get the nomination in before Sunday noon so the athlete is on the next field. General tactics that transfer to any public vote are laid out in how to get more votes online, and the organizer has published no rule welcoming paid vote services, so weigh any outside help against the risk of a newspaper voiding suspicious totals. For award-style ballots generally, see buy award votes.