Who should be the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel high school football athlete of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Journal Sentinel football athlete of the year poll is

This program is a single-question public poll. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the daily newspaper serving Milwaukee and whose online home is jsonline.com, asks its readers to choose its high school football athlete of the year for the season. Counting happens on Crowdsignal, a commercial polling service reached through the poll.fm address, at poll.fm/14567246.

The structure is simple by design. There are no multiple categories to work through and no entry forms for supporters to fill in. The newspaper curates the field itself, describes it as a selection of twenty standout athletes from the greater Milwaukee area, and readers do exactly one thing: pick a player and submit. Because it is a newspaper feature rather than a business contest, the field is made up of high school football players nominated by the paper's own sports staff, and the page title frames the whole thing as a question to the reader.

The facts in one place

One caution for anyone landing on the ballot: because the options are individual high school players, this page deliberately describes the programme through its publisher, its sport and its season instead of naming the young athletes on it. Their names, positions and schools are printed in full on the Journal Sentinel's own ballot for anyone who wants the complete field.

The dated record: which editions are confirmed and when the window closes

Two editions of this vote are confirmed, in 2023 and in 2024. Those consecutive football seasons are the basis on which the program counts as annual: the Journal Sentinel has put the same fall question to its readers in back-to-back years. The 2024 ballot, the poll numbered 14567246 on poll.fm, is dated to October, which places the vote squarely inside the Wisconsin high school football season rather than at a winter awards event.

The one hard closing time comes from the Journal Sentinel's own coverage of the vote: voting remains open until midnight on November 7. That sentence is the anchor for anyone planning a support push, because everything else about the calendar is softer. The poll page itself does not print its opening day, and the exact nomination dates that produced the twenty-player field are not shown alongside the ballot either.

The next edition year is likewise unstated. A poll that ran in 2023 and 2024 reads as a fixture of the paper's sports calendar, but the Journal Sentinel has not published a forward schedule for the award, and the poll.fm page for a closed edition simply says so in its title. Treat each autumn's ballot as its own event: check the newspaper's high school football reporting on jsonline.com when the season starts, and the current poll link will surface there. Anything time-sensitive beyond the November 7 close is best read off that fresh ballot, not inferred from how earlier editions ran.

How a supporter votes in the Journal Sentinel football poll today

Few ballots ask less of a voter. A supporter goes to the ballot at poll.fm/14567246, sees the Journal Sentinel's list of twenty nominees, marks a choice, and submits. Registration, email confirmation and payment are all absent: nothing sits between the reader and a counted ballot. Crowdsignal shows the running results after submission, so a supporter can see where their player stands in the field.

The one rule that shapes strategy is the newspaper's repeat-vote policy. The Journal Sentinel's coverage of the poll states that you may cast your vote multiple times, though only once per hour per device. Read carefully, that gives a determined supporter three levers: the hour between ballots on the same device, the number of devices in a household or team, and the number of days between the poll's opening and its midnight November 7 close. A family with three phones is, under this rule, three separate hourly voters.

What the ballot does not offer is any paid or expedited lane. The Journal Sentinel charges nothing to vote and publishes no tiered participation. Every supporter, whether a parent, a teammate or a stranger following Wisconsin high school football, works through the same single-question form.

Practical sequence: vote as early in the window as the ballot allows, note your timestamp, and build the hourly return into a routine. Because the close is fixed at midnight on November 7, an hourly rhythm sustained across the full window compounds into a large total without ever breaking the newspaper's stated rule.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Wisconsin has an unusually crowded field of reader-voted sports awards, and six sibling programs in the state sit alongside this one on our site. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week and the Green Bay Press-Gazette Cellcom Athlete of the Week serve the Fox Valley and northeast Wisconsin on a weekly rhythm. The La Crosse Tribune Supernova Athlete of the Week and the Racine Journal Times Athlete of the Week do the same in their own markets, and the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week and Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week round out the set.

Three differences set the Journal Sentinel's vote apart. First, scale of market: the Journal Sentinel is the state's largest newspaper by readership, and its poll speaks to the greater Milwaukee area rather than a single city or a two-city pairing. Second, cadence: most siblings are athlete-of-the-week features that reset every seven days, while this is a season-culminating award decided on one ballot. Third, scope: it is football only, where weekly awards rotate across every sport the paper covers.

The practical upshot for a supporter is competition density. Twenty nominees split the Milwaukee area's football community, and each nominee's school community is a potential voting bloc that the weekly programs never quite assemble.

Strengthening support within the Journal Sentinel's own rules

Everything that works in this poll works inside two facts: one vote per hour per device, and a hard close at midnight on November 7. That shape rewards consistency over bursts. A nominee's school can plan an hourly rhythm across its community, with families staggering their device votes through the day, and every ballot lands inside the newspaper's published rule.

Reach matters more than volume in a twenty-player field. The Journal Sentinel promotes the vote through its high school football reporting on jsonline.com, and nominees who share that coverage with their own school networks, team group chats and booster channels pull support the paper's audience alone would never supply. Each new supporter brings a fresh device, which the rule treats as a genuinely separate voting lane.

What the newspaper does not publish is any policy addressing purchased or automated votes on this ballot, so no paid shortcut has an organizer's blessing here. The safest reading is that the once-per-hour rule is the whole of the published terms. Tactics that respect a poll's structure rather than test it are set out in our guide to getting more votes online, and they translate directly to this ballot's hourly cadence.