Reno Gazette-Journal Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Champion Chevrolet polls, one dealership name, zero shared ballots

Search "Champion Chevrolet Athlete of the Week" and two live Nevada programs turn up, not one. That's the trap. The Reno Gazette-Journal runs its own version at rgj.com/sports for the Reno-Sparks metro. Elko Daily Free Press runs a separate one at elkodaily.com for the rural Elko County market, a few hundred miles northeast. Same dealership sponsorship. Different outlet, different nominees, different site, no shared results.

A supporter who lands on the wrong one during a busy week isn't voting for their athlete at all, just adding a click to an unrelated Northern Nevada program under an identical name. RGJ, part of the USA TODAY Network, opens its ballot to Northern Nevada varsity athletes across every sport and both genders, hosted at rgj.com/sports with no account needed. Nominations route through sports@rgj.com, not a web form.

Neither program publishes a running vote count. That's a real gap for anyone trying to pace a push, and it's worth naming rather than guessing at a number RGJ hasn't confirmed. What is confirmed is the mechanism itself, and that's enough to run a real campaign on. For the mechanics of pacing a real-turnout push against a poll with no visible scoreboard, see the online vote-buying guide.

Why Reno-Sparks gets its own ballot instead of joining Nevada's statewide one

Nevada already has a statewide Athlete of the Week program. The Las Vegas Review-Journal's Nevada Preps section runs it, pulling nominees from both Clark County and Northern Nevada onto one ballot with a published Thursday-noon close. RGJ doesn't feed into that program. It runs Champion Chevrolet as its own, separately branded poll under a different publisher, USA TODAY Network rather than Lee Enterprises, scoped specifically to the metro it actually covers.

That distinction matters for anyone comparing the two. A Reno-Sparks nominee on the statewide Nevada Preps ballot is competing in a pool where Clark County's much larger population and alumni networks dominate by sheer numbers. On RGJ's own Champion Chevrolet poll, the field stays Northern Nevada, Washoe County programs like Reed, McQueen, Bishop Manogue, Damonte Ranch, and Spanish Springs sit in a pool sized to the market rather than dwarfed by Las Vegas metro turnout. Nevada's statewide Athlete of the Week is the program to check for that wider comparison; the season-capping equivalent runs at Nevada High School Player of the Year.

None of it touches NIAA standing. The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association handles classifications, seeding, and championships entirely on its own track, and a Champion Chevrolet win changes nothing about postseason eligibility. It's a media promotion riding alongside real football, basketball, and every other varsity sport on the calendar, not a substitute for any of it.

What a Reno-Sparks campaign actually looks like

Start with the nomination. An email to sports@rgj.com needs the school, the sport, the opponent, and the performance that earned the nod, sent promptly by a coach or parent rather than routed through any online form, because there isn't one. Miss the opponent name and a small sports desk covering a whole metro has less to act on fast.

Once a nominee is live at rgj.com/sports, the actual push runs through the networks that already exist: a school's booster page, a team parent chain, the group text that includes alumni who left Washoe County years ago but still check in on Friday nights. That last group matters more here than it might elsewhere. The widget doesn't check location, so a Reed grad now living in Sacramento votes with the same single tap as someone at the game this weekend.

Because RGJ hasn't published a fixed weekly close time the way the statewide Nevada Preps ballot has (Thursday noon, publicly), the safest approach is checking the live page for the current window rather than assuming last week's timing repeated. Once a nominee's organic network is fully activated, some campaigns turn to real vote support to sustain the push through the final stretch. See Best of Nevada for the state's business-recognition side, and the Elko Daily version of this same sponsorship for how the identically named rural program runs. The full USA contest directory covers every other state and market running a fan-vote program like this one.