High School on SI National Girls Athlete of the Week (Utah): How Voting Works & How to Win

Two ballots, one sponsor, and why the Girls poll runs on its own clock

Utah readers land on High School on SI expecting one poll and often find two. The National Girls Athlete of the Week and the National Boys Athlete of the Week publish as separate weekly articles at si.com/high-school/national, each with its own nominee field, its own vote count, and its own winner. A Utah softball pitcher and a Utah football lineman are never on the same ballot, even in the same week.

That split matters for anyone trying to help a Utah nominee. The two headlines look almost identical in a search result. Bookmark the exact Girls URL, not the section homepage, or the wrong poll ends up open in the tab a supporter shares.

There's a third layer to this, too. Utah already runs its own statewide co-ed Athlete of the Week poll inside si.com's Utah section, a ballot limited to Utah nominees only. The National Girls poll is a different program entirely: nominees are pulled from every state onto one shared ballot. A Utah track athlete who appears on the National Girls poll one week is up against the whole country, not just against other Utah schools. Same publisher, same "High School on SI" name, three genuinely different ballots.

What the confirmed dates actually tell us

Two ballots anchor what's verifiable here: one dated May 18, 2026, one dated May 25, 2026. Both confirm the program was still running weekly at the close of the 2025-26 school year, right through the stretch when Utah softball and track post their biggest results.

The broader pattern is a weekly cycle that runs roughly November through June each school year, a window that spans winter volleyball, spring track, and spring softball all under one rolling program rather than a ballot tied to a single sport's calendar. No cash prize is confirmed anywhere on the page. The reward is the vote count itself and a named mention on a national sports media platform, nothing more, nothing less.

Utah nominees show up regularly on this ballot, not on a guaranteed weekly rotation. Some weeks favor softball results out of the Mountain West; other weeks the field tilts toward whatever region posted the loudest performances that seven-day stretch. A Utah supporter checking the current ballot before assuming a spot is the only reliable way to know if this week is one of them.

Building support for a Utah nominee on a national field

A national ballot changes the math from a state poll. On the Utah statewide poll, a nominee competes against a fixed, familiar pool of UHSAA schools. Here, a Utah softball nominee's real competition might be a track athlete in Ohio or a volleyball player in Texas, someone a Utah network has never heard of and has no way to scout in advance. (Utah softball has its own season-long recognition too, tracked separately on the Utah softball player-of-the-year page.)

What still works is the same thing that works on any open fan-vote ballot: reaching real people, fast, with the correct link. Team group chats, a school's athletic social accounts, extended family scattered outside Utah, all of it counts. Because this program runs on a rolling weekly cycle rather than a single season-ending vote, a Utah athlete who misses one week's ballot isn't done for the year; a strong following week can put her back in front of the same national editorial staff.

The organizer's current rules on the live page govern what counts as acceptable outreach in any given week, and those terms can shift, so checking them before a push is worth the two minutes it takes. For the wider mechanics of running a real-turnout campaign on an open ballot like this one, see the online vote-buying guide and the fan poll voting guide. Other Utah school and community fan-vote programs sit at the Utah contest hub, part of the full USA contest directory.