WBOY Harry Green Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Why WBOY's Athlete of the Week doesn't split by sport the way its neighbors do

Most fan-vote polls in this state split by sport, or at least by branding. Sports Illustrated runs separate football, boys' basketball, and girls' basketball ballots for West Virginia. Even WOWK, the Huntington-Charleston Nexstar station, brands its own feature specifically as a football poll, with "football" built right into the page's own URL. WBOY 12's page doesn't do that. It lives at the general wboy.com/sports/athlete-of-the-week/ address, no sport named anywhere in it, running under one title: the Harry Green Athlete of the Week.

Confirmed for the 2025 season: the page is live, the station is actively naming honorees under that single banner, and the most recent recognition checked for this guide went to a quarterback playing out of Morgantown. That the honoree happened to play football doesn't mean the feature is football-only. A one-URL, one-title structure like this is exactly the shape a station uses when it names athletes across multiple sports through a single ongoing feature, though nothing in the confirmed record states that outright either.

What the honoree's home market does establish is real. WBOY's reach extends past its Harrison County broadcast license, into Monongalia County, home to Morgantown, a short drive up I-79. One confirmed honoree from one county doesn't prove the ballot regularly pulls from Fairmont, Buckhannon, or Elkins too. It does establish that this isn't a Clarksburg-only feature dressed up as regional. For how a station-branded fan vote like this typically works once it's live, the online contest voting guide covers ground that applies before the West Virginia specifics take over.

Where the Harry Green ballot sits next to West Virginia's other fan votes

West Virginia runs more than one high school sports fan vote at a time, and they don't share an owner. Sports Illustrated hosts state-level features built on one national platform, including separate boys' and girls' basketball Athlete of the Week ballots for the state. WBOY's Harry Green award isn't part of that system. It's a station-branded feature living entirely on wboy.com, with its own posting schedule and no visible tie to SI's back end. Assuming one program's voting rules carry over to the other would be a mistake; they don't share infrastructure, so there's no reason to expect matching fine print.

What actually sits on wboy.com/sports/athlete-of-the-week/ is narrower than a national platform, and thinner on public documentation. No visible cap on the page. No listed close time. No nomination email published anywhere this guide could confirm. That's not unusual for a single-station feature. It's just a different animal than a syndicated national poll with years of dated archive posts behind it.

Read plainly, that table says something reassuring and something cautionary at once. Reassuring: this is a real, functioning broadcast feature with a genuine station behind it, not an abandoned page. Cautionary: half the practical questions a campaign needs answered, when does it close, how often can one device vote, aren't settled by anything public. Naming that gap honestly beats guessing at a rule and getting it wrong.

What actually happens when you open the WBOY vote page

Land on wboy.com/sports/athlete-of-the-week/ and you get a live station page, not a searchable historical database. The most recent post sits at the top. Older weeks scroll down or drop off entirely, depending on how the station's content system handles archiving. That structure rewards showing up during the actual voting window and punishes anyone searching for a specific past week months later.

Nothing in the confirmed record states how long each week's window stays open. Compare that to a national platform, where a fixed weekly close and a next-day announcement are printed in black and white on the page itself. WBOY's own page doesn't carry that same stated cadence, at least not in what's confirmed here. So the safest working assumption isn't a specific day. It's this: check the live post's own timestamp before telling anyone a deadline you can't verify yourself.

Account requirements follow the same pattern. No sign-up wall is confirmed. No login gate either. But nothing rules one out for a specific week's embed, and this guide isn't going to guess. A voter's best move is the boring one: open the actual page, look at what the voting element asks for, and go from there rather than borrowing a rule from a different station's poll.

The counties behind a Clarksburg newsroom's football-season ballot

WBOY broadcasts out of Clarksburg, in Harrison County, but its sports desk covers a stretch of North Central West Virginia that reaches well past the city limits. Monongalia County, home to Morgantown and its two big programs, Morgantown High School and University High School, sits a short drive northeast. Marion County, with Fairmont Senior and East Fairmont on either side of the Monongahela, isn't far either. Add Buckhannon-Upshur to the south, Elkins further into the mountains in Randolph County, and Lewis County's Weston-based program to the west, and the footprint covers a lot of two-lane highway between Friday nights.

That geography matters for how a nominee's support actually forms. A Harrison County program, Bridgeport or Robert C. Byrd, sits inside WBOY's home city and likely gets more casual viewer attention by default. A Morgantown nominee is competing from a county with a genuinely large population base of its own, university town included, even sitting a county away from where the station is licensed. Neither position is a guarantee of anything. It's just a different starting line.

None of this is a claim about a full nominee list. This guide has one confirmed 2025 name pattern, a quarterback out of Morgantown, and treats everything else here as regional geography, not a roster. The West Virginia contest hub lists WBOY's ballot alongside the state's other tracked programs, sport and business alike, including the Best in the Tri-State readers' poll to the south and CommunityVotes Charleston further down in the Kanawha Valley.

Building real support when half the rulebook is unpublished

Start with what's actually knowable. Read the live post at wboy.com/sports/athlete-of-the-week/ before doing anything else, since that's the only place a real cap or close time would show up if one exists. Share that exact link, not a generic homepage address, so supporters land on the current week's poll instead of whatever posted before it.

From there, the mechanics of reach look like they do for most station-branded polls: a team group chat, a booster email list, a coach or athletic director willing to post the link once. A Morgantown nominee can lean on a county with real population weight behind it. A Preston County or Lewis County nominee is working with a smaller natural base by comparison and probably needs every available channel moving early rather than late, since there's no confirmed extended window to fall back on.

Once that organic outreach is genuinely tapped and a nominee's total still looks short, paced vote support built for sports fan polls is worth reading against whatever WBOY's own page actually says for that specific week, not against a rule borrowed from a different station's ballot. The baseline question underneath all of it, is buying votes legal, deserves a straight answer before a campaign spends real effort: legality here depends on matching support to the platform's actual terms, and this platform's terms are thinner in public than most.