WTVR RVA Sports Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

Nine categories, one ballot, one Richmond ceremony

The RVA Sports Awards packs nine separate award categories, spanning individual athletes, teams, youth competitors, fans, and community figures, into a single annual WTVR CBS 6 ballot that ends with a live ceremony at the Altria Theater.

That is unusual. Most fan-vote sports programs pick one lane, a weekly player poll, a single all-star race, and stay there. WTVR built something closer to a year-end awards show: Female Athlete of the Year and Male Athlete of the Year sit next to Team of the Year, Youth Athlete of the Year, Youth Team of the Year, Fan of the Year, Moment of the Year, Event Impact of the Year, and Community Champion. Nine winners, one night, one theater.

Voting opens December 1 at wtvr.com/contests/rva-sports-awards. Free. No account. The station, a Nexstar property, runs it as a Richmond-metro program rather than a statewide Virginia one, though the reach extends into the surrounding counties. See how a narrower weekly format compares on the Virginia High School Athlete of the Week page, or browse everything else in the state via the Virginia contest hub.

What the nine categories actually reward

Read the list once and the pattern is clear: this ballot is built to reach every corner of Richmond sports, not just varsity standouts.

Because the categories overlap by design, a single district, Henrico County, Chesterfield County, Hanover County, Richmond Public Schools, Colonial Heights, Powhatan, Goochland, New Kent, can land finalists in two or three slots the same year. That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when nine categories draw from one regional sports desk's yearly coverage instead of nine separate nomination pools. For a race that stretches across an entire season rather than a single ceremony, compare the Virginia High School Player of the Year format.

December 1 opens it, the Altria Theater closes it

Mark the open date, not the close date: voting starts December 1 every cycle. The close date moves. So does the ceremony date, which has landed in different late-January weeks depending on the year, so treat any date you see here as historical context and check wtvr.com/contests/rva-sports-awards for the live window.

What doesn't move is the venue. The Altria Theater, a downtown Richmond performance hall better known for concerts and touring shows than sports banquets, hosts the results. That choice says something: WTVR is staging this as a citywide media event, not a locker-room dinner. Winners across all nine categories are read out on the same stage, the same night.

Mobilizing a Richmond-area finalist's support

No login wall means the entire tactical question is reach, not access. Who already has a reason to care about this finalist, and how fast can that group hear about the ballot?

Start narrow: teammates, classmates, the specific team roster, then widen to the school or county community around them. A Henrico or Chesterfield finalist pulls from PTA email chains and booster group texts that a Richmond Public Schools finalist won't have access to, and vice versa, so the actual channel depends on which district's community is behind the nomination. Because nine categories run at once, a district with finalists in both Team of the Year and Community Champion, say, can run one coordinated push that covers both rather than splitting attention.

The message that moves people names three things and nothing else: the finalist, the category, and how many days are left before the window closes. Anything longer gets skipped on a phone. For readers weighing paid support options against organic outreach, buy votes online covers the general mechanics, and fan poll votes and sports fan poll votes are the two closest matches to this program's ballot format. Pricing across vote volumes is listed at pricing, and the full state list of Richmond-area and Virginia programs sits on the USA contest index.