Tacoma News Tribune Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Wednesday noon — the close that most campaigns miss

The single most useful thing to know before you try to vote in this poll, or build support around it: the News Tribune's Athlete of the Week ballot closes Wednesday at noon Pacific time. Not Sunday night. Not Monday. Midday Wednesday.

That makes it structurally different from the other Washington high school sports polls worth knowing about. SI's statewide football and multi-sport polls close Monday at 11:59 p.m. VarsityWA's football series closes Friday at noon. The TNT closes in the middle of the week, before most families have gotten far into their Wednesday routine. A campaign that treats this like a weekend poll will run out of time by Tuesday night without realizing it.

Track and spring season polls close Thursday at noon instead — one day later, one more morning to work with. But that Thursday close also catches people off guard, because the spring TNT series is less publicized than the football and basketball editions. Every season the mechanics shift slightly. Check the article header for the exact close time that week.

The practical consequence of a Wednesday noon deadline is that the decisive window runs Monday evening to Wednesday morning. School starts Wednesday and most families are in routine by 8 a.m. The votes that matter happen Tuesday — team group chats, booster pages, a parent posting to the school's Facebook group before work. Anyone who waits to share until Wednesday morning is running out of runway.

The South Sound map — fifteen schools, one ballot

The News Tribune covers what the locals call the South Sound: Tacoma, Pierce County, and a ring of communities from Federal Way in the north to Tumwater in the south. On paper that is a geography. In practice it is a set of very different high school communities that occasionally end up on the same ballot.

The December 2025 basketball ballot is a good illustration. Fifteen athletes from twelve schools appeared in a single combined poll: Kennedy Catholic and Bellarmine Prep (Tacoma private schools), Silas and Lincoln (Tacoma public), Tahoma and Auburn (East Pierce and East King counties), Black Hills and Tumwater (Thurston County, technically outside Pierce). One Wednesday noon deadline for all of them.

That breadth matters for campaigns. A nominee from Kennedy Catholic is drawing on a tight Catholic school alumni network that runs through Tacoma and into the suburbs. A nominee from Graham-Kapowsin is drawing on a sprawling East Pierce County community whose football program has won state championships. A Tumwater athlete is drawing on a school from a different county entirely — one whose sports culture is strong enough that the News Tribune still includes it. None of those networks activate the same way or at the same speed.

And the football ballot confirms it: Lance McGee of Sumner and athletes from Mount Tahoma, Graham-Kapowsin, Black Hills, and Stadium appeared on the same November 2025 poll — a Spanaway powerhouse, a Tacoma ISD school, and a smaller South Sound program, all competing for reader clicks. Sumner's McGee later won the TNT's own all-state football award. Making the poll field and winning the fan vote are separate things; the community response to the ballot is its own story.

Nominating, and why the Sunday deadline matters as much as Wednesday

There are two deadlines in the Washington fan-vote cycle, and the TNT's are both tighter than most people expect.

Sunday at 5 p.m. is when nominations close. That is when Jon Manley and Tyler Wicke stop taking submissions for the upcoming ballot. Email either of them — [email protected] or [email protected] — or DM @jmanleysports or @TylerWicke on X with the athlete's name, school, sport, the game date, the opponent, and the stat line. A performance from Friday night's game has roughly thirty-six hours to get in front of the editors before the field is set.

The ballot then goes live early in the week and closes Wednesday at noon. That is roughly sixty to seventy-two hours of voting time — less if the article posts Monday afternoon rather than Sunday night.

So the full cycle for any given week is: Friday-night game, Saturday film and stat confirmation, Sunday evening nomination, Monday ballot opening, Tuesday as the core voting day, Wednesday morning as the last real push before noon. Miss Sunday and you are not on the ballot. Miss Tuesday's mobilization window and the Wednesday close catches you flat. Both deadlines are real.

For the broader picture of Washington high school sports fan votes, the state directory at /usa/washington/ covers the other active polls — including VarsityWA's statewide series and the SI Washington football poll. The national guide at /usa/ maps out how regional newspaper polls like this one fit the wider landscape.