Vote for The Herald's Prep Football Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What The Herald's prep football athlete of the week vote is

The Herald, a Washington newspaper, runs a weekly reader vote that names a prep football athlete of the week during the high school football season. The organizer publishes sports coverage for Washington readers, and this ballot is one of its engagement formats: a shortlist of nominated players, a public poll, and a weekly honor decided by whoever collects the most support.

The balloting platform is Crowdsignal, which serves its polls through the poll.fm domain. The ballot this page describes sits at https://poll.fm/14571188. Because The Herald posts a new poll for every date range in the season, that address holds the latest ballot in the series rather than a permanent form, and earlier weekly polls close as each window ends.

Nothing on the ballot asks a supporter to pay or to register before voting, which is what distinguishes this format from judged awards or ticketed events. The publisher decides the nominee list each week, and readers supply everything else with a click.

The dated record for The Herald's weekly football poll

Confirmed editions of this weekly series ran in 2023 and 2024, and within each year the vote runs week by week rather than as a single annual event. The ballot at poll.fm/14571188 carried the window of Oct. 20-26 and is marked closed, which places that week inside the October stretch of the fall football season.

Two deadlines shape every weekly cycle. Nominees must be submitted by 9 a.m. Monday, and voting closes at midnight Sunday. That gives a nominee's supporters the days between the Monday nomination and the Sunday close to gather votes, a runway of less than a full week.

The final standings on the closed Oct. 20-26 ballot show how decisive a single week's turnout can be: the leading nominee finished at 77 percent with 217 votes, the runner-up at 10 percent with 29 votes, and the third nominee at 8 percent with 22 votes. A margin that wide means early momentum, not a last-day push, decided the honor.

The Herald has not published which year the next season's ballots begin, and the ballot prints no per-reader vote limit and no eligibility rule; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those gaps matter less than they would on a yearly award, because the weekly rhythm means a fresh poll, a fresh roster and a fresh deadline arrive with every date range during the season.

How a supporter votes in The Herald's poll today

Voting takes a supporter three steps. Start from the current poll.fm ballot at poll.fm/14571188, read the nominated athletes for that week's date range, select a choice, and submit it on the page. The poll displays the running percentage and vote total beside each nominee, so a supporter can see the standings before and after voting.

Three things the ballot does not state are worth naming. It prints no rule on repeat voting within a weekly window. It describes no account or registration step for participation. And it carries no write-in option, so only the publisher's nominated roster can collect votes in a given week.

Because The Herald publishes a new poll every week of the Washington high school football season, the practical habit for a supporter is to start each week from the publisher's newest ballot rather than a bookmarked link to an old one. An old link still opens, but it lands on a poll already marked closed, as the Oct. 20-26 ballot now is.

The nomination side matters as much as the voting side. Nominees must be submitted by 9 a.m. Monday, which means a player's week is won or lost before the poll even opens if nobody submits the name in time. A supporter who wants an athlete on the ballot needs to act at the start of the week, not after the poll is live.

How this ballot sits beside other Washington athlete votes

Washington readers have several weekly and seasonal athlete votes to choose from, and The Herald's prep football ballot is the one anchored to its own newspaper's coverage area. Its closest neighbours include the Tacoma News Tribune Athlete of the Week and the News Tribune Girls Athlete of the Week (Tacoma), both run by a different publisher for a different market.

Other siblings cover wider ground. The Washington High School Football Player of the Week and the VarsityWA Football Athlete of the Week both address football statewide, while the VarsityWA Basketball Athlete of the Week moves the same weekly format to a different sport. The Seattle Sports Star of the Year is the outlier, an annual honor rather than a weekly series.

What makes The Herald's ballot distinct is the combination of a single publisher, a single sport and a weekly reset. A nominee who loses one week's poll is not eliminated from the series, because the next Monday brings a new nomination deadline and a new roster. That structure rewards sustained community support across a season instead of a single mobilization, and it means the standings on any one closed poll, like the Oct. 20-26 ballot, say nothing about the following week's field.

Rallying support inside a one-week Herald voting window

The defining constraint of this program is time. Nominees are due by 9 a.m. Monday and the poll closes at midnight Sunday, so any effort to strengthen a nominee's standing has roughly six days to work. Outreach that starts midweek is already behind, and the 77 percent to 10 percent spread on the closed Oct. 20-26 ballot shows how far a well-organized week can pull ahead of a slow one.

The practical playbook is local and direct: put the exact poll.fm link in front of the nominee's school community early in the week, repeat the reminder before the Sunday close, and make the date range clear so nobody votes on a stale ballot. The Herald has not published a rule on organized outside help for this series, so the organizer's own ballot is the only authority on what support methods it accepts.

For a fuller treatment of outreach that fits a short weekly window, see how to get more votes online, and for the format-specific version see award contest votes. No vote package, whoever sells it, can guarantee a win in a poll whose totals the publisher alone controls.