Seattle Sports Star of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Washington runs four statewide fan-vote programs. Only one puts athletes across pro, college, and amateur sport on the same ballot.

Compare Sports Star of the Year against its closest Washington siblings and the shape becomes obvious fast. The KING 5 Best of Western Washington vote covers restaurants, businesses, and local services, no athletes at all. The Washington High School Athlete of the Week and the state's football-specific weekly polls cover one level: prep sports, one week at a time, one sport or one school. Sports Star of the Year does neither. It runs once a year, and it puts an NFL wide receiver, an MLS midfielder, a WNBA forward, and a Division I college guard on the exact same card.

None of the three overlap on scope. That is the actual pitch for this page: if a reader lands here searching for "Seattle sports vote," this is the only one of the four where a Seahawk and a Gonzaga player are on the same ballot fighting for the same trophy.

The nominees, and what the 2026 field says about how the ballot gets built

Confirmed 2026 nominees: Jaxon Smith-Njigba of the Seahawks, Cristian Roldan of the Sounders, Gabby Williams of the Storm, and Gonzaga's Yvonne Ejim. Four sports, four leagues, one ballot. The Commission, a nonprofit with no ownership stake in any of the four teams, builds this field itself from the season's results across the state. There is no fan-submission process the way there is on some weekly high-school football polls elsewhere in Washington.

Ejim's presence matters more than it might look. She plays in Spokane County, nearly 300 miles from the Puget Sound teams that dominate the rest of the field. Her nomination is the clearest evidence that "Seattle" in the program's name is a legacy brand label, not a geographic filter on who can win.

Mechanics: once per day, through February 14, no submission form

Voting is free at seattlesports.org. One vote per day per person is the organiser's stated rule: no bulk voting, no per-session multiplier. That cap does the opposite of what a one-time viral share does. It rewards whoever shows up daily across the full window, not whoever posts loudest once. A supporter who votes from the nomination announcement straight through February 14 will out-accumulate someone who votes once, however enthusiastically.

Because the Commission runs other events on the same domain year-round, double-check the URL points at the current Sports Star Awards cycle before voting. Old event pages have a way of outranking the live one in a quick search. Readers weighing whether organic reach alone will be enough can look at how a real votes campaign typically supplements a network push once its own reach plateaus.

Why a 91-year-old vote still gets cross-promoted by teams that didn't exist for most of its history

1936. That's the first year. The Sounders didn't exist until 2009 (MLS) or 1974 (NASL, depending which lineage you count); the Storm arrived in 2000. So for most of this program's run, none of the three franchises now driving its fan turnout were on the map. Winners get named live every March at the Seattle Convention Center's Summit building, broadcast on KING 5, a TV slot most single-sport fan polls simply don't have.

That history is probably why the cross-promotion flows the direction it does: teams promote the vote to their fan bases, not the other way around, because the Commission's institutional standing predates all of them.

Running a network push across four fan bases that don't normally talk to each other

The strategic problem here isn't turnout, it's coordination. A Seahawks fan, a Sounders supporter, a Storm season-ticket holder, and a Gonzaga alum are four separate social graphs that rarely overlap, and each nominee only has a claim on one of them. A message naming the nominee, their team, and the February 14 date gives any one of those four networks what it needs to act. But it has to reach each network on its own terms, not as one generic post.

Because the cap is once per day, the real lever is reach across the whole window, not intensity on any single day. Fan poll vote support can extend a nominee's organic push once a network's own reach is tapped out, and a signup-based push is worth understanding too, since some cycles have required an account step. Compare that daily-cap dynamic against the state's other fan-vote programs in the Washington fan-vote directory, check the mechanics behind the VarsityWA weekly poll for contrast, or read the general playbook behind structured vote campaigns and getting votes on social media before building a plan for this specific ballot.