Sheridan Press Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Sheridan County runs two athlete polls a week. Most of Wyoming runs one.

Nearly every other Wyoming community has a single Athlete of the Week vote to track, the WyoPreps program spread across Townsquare Media radio-station sites like kisscasper.com, k2radio.com, and y95country.com. Sheridan County broke from that pattern. The Sheridan Press built its own ballot, on its own platform, Second Street App, at thesheridanpress.secondstreetapp.com. Same weekly rhythm, completely separate program. Anyone comparing that structure against how Wyoming's other prep-sports and readers'-choice programs run county by county will find the statewide hub is the faster reference point than digging through either paper's archive.

Nothing links the two. A Sheridan High School performance can land on the WyoPreps ballot in the same week a different, or even the same, performance is nominated on The Sheridan Press's own poll. Miss one site and a supporter can miss a vote their own school is actively running without ever knowing it existed. That's the one fact worth internalizing before doing anything else here: two independent ballots, not one. The statewide counterpart, Wyoming High School Athlete of the Week, keeps its own separate close time and editorial process.

The newspaper's own Facebook copy spells out the sequence without hedging: submissions first, then "cast your vote." Collect nominations, then run the public ballot independently of any radio network. It's a small operational choice with a real effect on who a supporter needs to reach and when. Readers curious how other newspaper- and community-run fan polls handle a comparable split-market setup can look at how those mechanics differ program to program.

The Second Street App ballot, and what it does not tell you

Second Street App is the contest platform behind both this poll and The Sheridan Press's separate "Best of the Bighorns" business readers'-choice contest. Every weekly Athlete of the Week ballot lives on its own dedicated page under the newspaper's Second Street App account, not the newspaper's homepage. So the page you land on from a search result might be three weeks stale. Readers weighing how similar newspaper-run ballots are built in other states can browse the USA fan-vote and readers'-choice hub for comparison.

What the table can't tell you: there's no single standings page pulling every week's ballot into one place. The newspaper doesn't publish an archive index, so the Facebook page is often faster than the Second Street App site itself for finding this week's link. Confirm the date on whatever page you land on before voting. For how fan-driven ballots like this one typically get organized and promoted, the online voting contest guide covers the general mechanics, and the social-sharing playbook is a reasonable starting point for a school-group push.

Three school districts, one ballot, uneven turnout math

Sheridan County spans three school districts, and which one shows up on a given week's ballot depends entirely on whose performance got submitted and nominated that week. District 2 (Sheridan High School) is the county's biggest, with the largest single alumni and student pool available for one push. District 1 covers Big Horn and its surrounding area. District 3, Arvada-Clearmont, is the smallest and the most rural of the three.

Size cuts both ways here. A Sheridan High nomination competes for attention inside the county's largest, most digitally networked community, where a reminder in the right school Facebook group can reach hundreds fast. A Big Horn or Arvada-Clearmont nomination starts from a smaller base. But that base is tighter. School, town, and extended family overlap directly enough that a personal text to twenty people can outperform a broad post to two thousand. Small and centralized beats large and diffuse more often than the raw enrollment numbers would suggest.

One caution specific to this county: sharing a WyoPreps link does nothing for a nominee's standing on The Sheridan Press's own Second Street App ballot. They're separate votes. A supporter backing a District 1 or District 3 nominee needs to confirm which poll, or both, actually has that performance listed before spending any outreach effort. Genuine fan-vote support only helps if it lands on the ballot that's actually open, and Sheridan County's other live program, Best of Wyoming, runs its own separate readers'-choice format on that same Second Street App account.