La Crosse Tribune Supernova Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The gap most first-time voters don't expect

There is no fixed page to bookmark. That's the part that trips people up. Most newspaper athlete-of-the-week polls, including several other Wisconsin papers already covered on this site, run at a standing URL you can save and return to every week. The La Crosse Tribune doesn't work that way. The Supernova Athlete of the Week ballot lives inside the paper's regular sports coverage at lacrossetribune.com/sports, folded into whatever that week's post happens to be.

The Tribune also hasn't published a vote cap. No stated hourly limit, no daily reset, nothing on the record saying whether one reader can vote once or fifty times. It hasn't published a fixed close day either. Some Gannett sister papers spell out a Sunday-night or Thursday-afternoon cutoff; this one doesn't, at least not anywhere in the paper's public sports coverage. That's worth naming outright rather than guessing at a schedule that isn't confirmed.

What is confirmed: five area high school athletes, drawn from whatever sport is in season, competing on one weekly ballot for the "standout performance" title. Gannett owns the Tribune, the same company behind dozens of the newspaper polls already indexed on this site, but each Gannett paper runs its own mechanics locally. La Crosse's version, so far, is the sparsest on published detail.

What "Coulee Region" means for who shows up on the ballot

The Tribune's coverage area runs the La Crosse School District out through Onalaska, Holmen, and the Mississippi Valley Conference, with Coulee Conference programs from the smaller surrounding towns also in the mix. That's a river-bluff region, not a single city beat, so a Onalaska volleyball standout and a rural Coulee Conference wrestler can land on the same five-name ballot in the same week.

None of that overlaps with Wisconsin's other newspaper-run polls on this site. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ballot never touches western Wisconsin. Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh, and Racine each run their own separate market polls too. La Crosse sits far enough west, and close enough to the Minnesota border, that its sports-fan community follows this paper and this ballot specifically, not any of those.

The statewide WisSports.net poll does cover all 501 WIAA schools including La Crosse-area programs, but it's a separate organization with its own five-nominee ballot and a published daily cap the Tribune's poll doesn't share. A La Crosse athlete could, in theory, show up on both in the same week. Two different polls, two different vote counts, no shared result.

Running a campaign against rules that aren't fully public

Campaigning here is a little different because so much of the mechanics page is blank. No cap means reach matters more than repetition; a hundred different people voting once each almost certainly outweighs one person hammering refresh, though the Tribune hasn't confirmed either scenario changes the count. Team group chats, a school's athletic social accounts, and the family networks that already follow Onalaska, Holmen, or La Crosse Central sports are the direct path to real voters who'd otherwise never see the post.

Because there's no fixed weekly close time, don't build a campaign around a single big push on a guessed deadline. Check lacrossetribune.com/sports again once results or a new week's nominees appear, that's the clearest evidence the previous window has shut. A steady daily reminder through the sports section beats a one-shot blast timed to a day that was never confirmed.

For a broader walkthrough of how online fan-vote campaigns work in general, see the online vote-buying guide. Wisconsin's other prep sports polls, all of them with more published detail than this one, sit at the Wisconsin contest hub, part of the full USA contest directory.