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

What the a-J Athlete of the Week is and who runs it

Under the name The a-J Athlete of the Week, the A-J hands its Texas readers the final say on a weekly sports honor for area high schools. The ballot poses the question, who should be the A-J's athlete of the week, and lists that week's nominees for readers to choose among. Voting happens on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), and the current ballot address is https://poll.fm/16258933.

This poll belongs to the sport vertical and runs a plain public-vote mechanic: whichever nominee collects the most reader support takes the week. It is a short-cycle honor tied to the fall sports calendar rather than a chamber's business survey or a seasonal readers' choice balloting. Each ballot is brief, presenting the nominee list, a set of answer entries and a submit action, with results shown as percentages and raw counts once the poll closes.

The closed ballot from the latest week displays that shape in full, a finished poll with final standings beside each nominee's school. A supporter needs no knowledge of the hosting platform to take part. The vote is a plain page carrying a question and a pick, which is why the series moves quickly and why the weekly rhythm matters more than any long campaign.

The dated record: confirmed seasons and the published standings

Two seasons of the series are on the books: 2023 and 2025. Those two seasons make the poll a recurring annual fixture, and the next season is expected in 2026. The 2025 season ran from September through November and produced seven ballots, one poll per week, with a fresh slate of nominees each time.

The closed ballot from that season's most recent week shows how a week finishes. The top nominee finished at 54% on 24,377 votes, the runner-up took 25% on 11,266 votes, a nominee further down drew 16% on 7,434 votes, and the lowest printed total sits at 4% on 1,719 votes. Those figures are printed beside the standings, so the margin between a winning push and a quiet week is visible to anyone who opens the closed ballot.

What the organizer leaves off the page: no category list exists for the ballot, nothing says whether the same supporter can return to a weekly poll and vote again, and no eligibility terms are printed. No dates for future platform rounds appear either. When each weekly poll opens and closes is another date left unstated by the organizer; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Voting happens on the ballot itself. The poll sits on Crowdsignal (poll.fm) at the address listed above, and opening it brings up the week's question along with the nominee slate. A reader selects the nominee they want and submits; the closed version of the poll then shows the percentage beside the raw count for every school.

Nominations come first, and the organizer's own wording sets their rhythm: "The A-J accepts nominations each week until noon Sunday." That deadline anchors the whole series. A nominee named before the Sunday noon cutoff faces the reader vote that follows; one who misses it waits for a later week. Everything else in the cycle, the posting of the ballot and the arrival of the result, falls between those points.

What the poll does not state is whether a supporter may come back day after day within a given week's balloting. No repeat-voting rule appears beside it and the organizer publishes no eligibility terms, so a supporter planning a multi-day push has nothing in print to build on. The practical reading is simple. This is a plain public poll, the nominees are set weekly, and the Sunday noon deadline is the fixed date in a supporter's calendar.

How this ballot sits beside other Texas athlete polls

Texas carries a deep bench of publisher-decided athlete ballots, and this poll holds a distinct slot among them. The Austin American-Statesman Athlete of the Week runs its own reader vote for the Austin market, while the DFW Star Local Media poll serves its own suburban coverage area under a separate publisher. Both are separate programs with separate rules, and support earned on poll.fm does not transfer to either.

Football-specific programs sit nearby too. The CenTex weekly football player poll, the Dallas / North Texas weekly football player poll and the East Texas weekly football player poll each narrow the sport to the gridiron, while Dave Campbell's Texas Football Quarterback of the Year narrows it further, to a single position across a full year.

The A-J's ballot differs from all of these in cadence and in host. It refreshes weekly during the season instead of running as a season-long vote, and it lives on Crowdsignal (poll.fm) instead of a publisher's in-house contest system. For a supporter that changes the shape of an effort: a weekly poll rewards fast mobilization inside a short window, while a longer ballot rewards sustained returns across months.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this series

Support in this program is won week by week. Because the A-J accepts nominations each week until noon Sunday, the first job for anyone backing an athlete is to make sure the nomination lands before that cutoff; a nominee who misses it cannot appear on that week's ballot at all. Once the nominee is listed, support means moving people to the live poll quickly, since a weekly ballot gives a window of days rather than a whole season.

Handing the poll.fm link to school communities, asking them to pass it along, and reminding supporters while the poll is still open all fit the format. The organizer has published no rules about outside help or organized voting pushes, and the ballot itself carries no stated limits on how support is gathered, so the weekly deadline and the open poll are the constraints that actually bind. For tactics that carry across public-vote contests of this kind, see our votes guide, and for the rules picture around paid support, award-vote support is explained without promises.