Green Bay Press-Gazette Cellcom Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

48,213 votes: what a winning number here actually means

Start with the number that defines the competitive floor in this poll. Liam Letizia of Green Bay West won the Week 9 fall 2025 Cellcom ballot with 48,213 votes. Not 5,000. Not 12,000. Forty-eight thousand two hundred and thirteen. For a regional weekly prep poll, that is a serious volume — one that requires more than a team's active roster sharing a link and calling it done.

The spring 2026 numbers are lower but still substantial: Ruth Krause of Pulaski won the week ending May 23 with 34,102 votes; the runner-up had 12,323. Elizabeth Boughton's winning week came in at 18,133. So the range confirmed on record is 18,000 to 48,000, with the low end in spring soccer weeks and the high end in a fall football week. That gap tells you something about community mobilization patterns by sport — and what week of the year you are in matters as much as the nominee.

The practical takeaway: this is not a poll where 500 votes move you into contention. The question here is how a community pushes past five digits. And the Saturday 3:00 p.m. Central close means the answer has to happen by Friday night and Saturday morning, not Sunday.

Saturday 3 p.m.: the close that catches most people off guard

The Green Bay Press-Gazette poll closes Saturday at 3:00 p.m. Central. Every week. That is a specific, early close in the Gannett Wisconsin network — earlier than you would expect if you have followed other state polls.

For comparison: the Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom poll (same sponsor, same network, Fox Valley region) closes Friday at 3:00 p.m. The statewide SI Wisconsin polls run to Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The WisSports.net Athlete of the Week runs through the weekend. The Press-Gazette ballot is on its own schedule — Saturday afternoon — which means the work happens mid-week and Friday, not over the weekend when most casual supporters finally have time to click.

The two Gannett polls — Press-Gazette and Post-Crescent — are the most aggressive in terms of early close. If you are from the Fox Valley and accustomed to the Post-Crescent's Friday deadline, the Green Bay poll gives you one additional day. But relative to the statewide polls, both Gannett ballots are closing while most voters are still in their Saturday morning routines. A campaign here needs Thursday and Friday as its main push days, with Saturday morning as the final sprint.

The NE Wisconsin field: who shows up, and which sports

The Green Bay metro prep scene has specific programs that recur on this ballot. Bay Port won the 2024 WIAA Division 1 football championship; West De Pere won D2 in 2025. Notre Dame Academy (Green Bay) had a player appear on SI's offensive Player of the Week ballot with 502 rushing yards in a single playoff game. These are not small programs. The Press-Gazette covers real depth of talent.

The ballot's multi-sport, mixed-gender format is one of its most distinctive features. In the week ending May 16, 2026, the six nominees included soccer (Ruth Krause, Pulaski), golf (Grant Lawton, De Pere), baseball (Drew LeClaire, Bay Port; Nolan Vertz, Ashwaubenon), and softball (Kaia Waldrop and Olivia Waldrop, both from GBND). That is two teammates on the same ballot — a dynamic that can split or consolidate GBND votes depending on which supporters you reach first.

The week ending May 23 drew seven nominees: golf, girls soccer, baseball, softball, each from a different school. A soccer program at Pulaski can face a baseball nominee from West De Pere on the exact same ballot. There is no sport bracket here — one poll, all sports, all genders, one Saturday close. The community that mobilizes broadest takes it.

Running a campaign in the Green Bay market

The confirmed vote totals say more about how campaigns work here than any tactical list could. Ruth Krause's 34,102-vote win in a spring soccer week means the Pulaski community pushed that number before Saturday at 3 p.m. In Elizabeth Boughton's 18,133-vote week the runner-up landed 12,323 votes — a spread of more than 5,000. These are not close races. They are communities that organized early and widely, against fields that did not.

Green Bay metro has distinct community networks by school type. Bay Port and West De Pere draw from large suburban populations with broad alumni bases; Pulaski serves a more compact community that proved in spring 2026 it can mobilize more than 34,000 votes when engaged. GBND operates as a Catholic school with alumni networks that cross Green Bay neighborhoods. These are different network topologies, and the winning strategy for each looks different: GBND needs to activate its alumni chain early; Pulaski's community, based on the May 2026 result, is already fast when it wants to be.

Because no subscription is needed and the poll appears on Yahoo Sports and AOL as well as the Press-Gazette site, supporters do not have to navigate a paywalled publication. That lowers the friction considerably compared to some regional polls. For a ballot that requires five-digit totals to be competitive, vote-support campaigns built for weekly media polls make sense here. For how these weekly fan polls typically operate, the how-to guide covers the recurring cadence. The full Wisconsin fan-vote context is at /usa/wisconsin/, and the national directory is at /usa/.