Who should be VarsityWA's Basketball Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The gap a supporter hits first: a weekly ballot with no published schedule

Someone trying to rally votes for a Washington high school basketball athlete runs into the same problem every week: VarsityWA publishes the ballot, but it does not publish a season calendar saying when each weekly round starts or stops. The program's identity is on the page in full, the nominee list is on the page in full, and the voting link works, yet the start and end of the current round go unstated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That gap matters because a weekly poll rewards timing. The stated rule lets a supporter vote once per person per day, so a fan who discovers a ballot on its closing day has lost most of the window a classmate who saw the post on day one still has. There is no nomination form to plan around either: the ballot page presents a finished list of nominees, so the practical planning question is not how to get listed but when this round began and how many days of daily voting remain.

The workable habit is to treat VarsityWA's own coverage as the signal. The organizer posts each round as its own poll page, so a supporter who wants to mobilize a school community should watch for the new ballot rather than rely on a saved link from a previous week. Everything else about the format, the platform and the daily rule is stable from round to round; only the window moves.

What the VarsityWA basketball athlete of the week program is

This VarsityWA program is a weekly reader vote in the sport vertical, staged by VarsityWA for Washington high school basketball. The ballot runs on Crowdsignal, reached through poll.fm, and the page for this program sits at poll number 16730273. The program's own name is phrased as a question to readers, which fits the format: VarsityWA hands the weekly decision to its audience instead of picking the honoree in the newsroom.

The ballot draws nominees from schools and communities across the state. Rounds on file have paired athletes from places including Zillah, Bremerton, Colfax, Rainier Beach, Eastside Catholic and Lummi Nation, a spread that runs from small eastern Washington towns to Seattle-area programs. That statewide reach is the practical difference between this ballot and a single-city award.

Because the organizer is a dedicated high school sports outlet rather than a chamber or a radio station, the ballot sits inside regular coverage instead of standing alone. Readers arrive from articles about games and teams, then vote on the athlete question the same coverage raises.

The dated history: which editions ran and when the window falls

This program's 2023 and 2025 ballots are on file, the history that qualifies the program as annual. The June round of 2025 opened and closed entirely inside that month. VarsityWA has not printed open and close dates for its weekly rounds on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No nomination window is published separately, and the ballot presents nominees as a finished list rather than a submission form.

The June round closed with a final tally shown on the page. The leading nominee finished at 66 percent with 3,009 votes, and the runner-up line drew 31 percent with 1,415 votes. Publishing the closed result is standard Crowdsignal behavior and gives supporters a clear picture of how decisive a weekly margin can be: a gap of that size reflects several days of organized daily voting, not a last-hour surge.

Because each week is its own poll, the 2023 and 2025 entries in the history are anchors rather than a full list of rounds; weekly ballots between and around them are separate poll pages that are not individually listed here. The next round is expected in 2026, and the only dependable way to read its window is the live ballot itself once VarsityWA posts it.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

Taking part takes minutes. A supporter opens the current Crowdsignal ballot at poll.fm, reads a list of nominees in which each athlete is paired with a school or community, selects a choice, and submits. Nothing stands in front of the vote: no account, no sign-in, no fee. The poll page displays the result once the round closes, which is why supporters who arrive late can still see the final standings of a finished week.

The organizer's stated participation rule is worth quoting as it appears: you can vote once per person per day. That single sentence defines legitimate repeat participation. Returning on a second day with the same device and the same intent is inside the rule; several submissions inside a single sitting is not, and a ballot showing a burst of irregular activity risks whatever sanction the organizer applies. VarsityWA has not published additional enforcement language on the ballot page, so the daily sentence is the whole written rule a supporter can rely on.

Two further points follow from the format itself. First, the nominee list changes every week, so a vote cast on an old poll page does nothing for the current round; always start from the fresh ballot. Second, because each round is a standalone poll, sharing the specific ballot link with your school community matters more than sharing the organizer's home page.

Strengthening support in this weekly ballot

Support that works in this program is built on the daily rule. Since the stated limit is once per person per day, the highest-value move a family, team or student group can make is a short, dated ask: vote today, vote again tomorrow, keep going until the ballot locks. A group chat reminder each morning during the open window multiplies a single supporter into a daily habit across a whole roster of families.

Ground the ask in the ballot itself. Share the exact poll link for the current week, name the athlete and school so nobody votes for the wrong line, and remind people the poll closes without warning because VarsityWA does not print close dates. Ask each person to send the ballot to their own contacts rather than reposting the same message, since fresh circles of voters are worth more than repeat reminders to the same circle.

Stay inside the organizer's stated rules: no scripts, no repeat submissions inside a session, nothing that misrepresents who is voting. This is a school-level honor, and a win that came from rule bending helps nobody. For broader tactics that fit a daily-return poll like this, see how to get more votes online and the site's award vote guide.

How this ballot sits beside its Washington neighbours

Washington hosts a cluster of public-vote sports awards, and this ballot is the weekly, basketball-specific member of that group. The nearest siblings by publisher are the VarsityWA Football Athlete of the Week and the VarsityWA Basketball Athlete of the Week, both built on the same weekly Crowdsignal format with the sport swapped. A reader who understands one understands the other, and football households can support their own ballot in season.

Three newspaper-run programs sit nearby. The Tacoma News Tribune Athlete of the Week and the News Tribune Girls Athlete of the Week (Tacoma) are rooted in a single newsroom's coverage area, while the Washington High School Football Player of the Week takes a statewide football angle. The Seattle Sports Star of the Year is the outlier: a yearly, city-anchored honor rather than a weekly school poll.

What distinguishes the VarsityWA basketball ballot within this group is its combination of frequency, sport focus and statewide reach. It asks its question every week during the basketball season's rounds, it names no runner-up prize structure beyond the weekly honor itself, and it lets small towns like Zillah and Colfax compete on the same list as large metro programs, which few of its neighbours do.