Texas High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one rule most voters get wrong before they start

Most Texas fan-vote polls work the same way every week: no cap, same close day, same field size. The Texas High School Athlete of the Week does not. Two things change with the calendar, and getting either one wrong can cost a campaign an entire day or a majority of available votes.

The first is the vote cap. During basketball and wrestling season — the February 3, 2025 ballot is the confirmed example — the article explicitly says "we do not set limits on how many times a fan can vote." The same poll during spring sports season says "limited to one vote every 6 hours." Same organizer, same platform, same embedded widget. The controlling rule is printed in the article header; read it before you tell anyone how to vote.

The second is the close day. The poll closed Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Central through the winter and spring of 2025. The August 26, 2025 ballot — early fall, before football fully overtakes the schedule — closed Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. Central. A supporter who assumes the Sunday deadline from last season and stops voting Saturday night may be leaving two full days on the table.

The practical upshot: every week's AOTW article is the only authoritative source for that week's rules. The hub page at si.com/high-school/texas/athlete-of-the-week links to the current ballot, and the close date and cap statement are both near the top of that article.

What A'Maya Holton's 8,000-vote win tells you about scale

The sharpest data point on record for this poll is A'Maya Holton, San Antonio East Central, Girls Basketball, January 2025: roughly 50% of more than 8,000 total votes cast. That number belongs in the foreground of any discussion about what it takes to win here.

Eight thousand total votes across a 25-name field means Holton's share was somewhere north of 4,000 individual vote-casts. That is a different campaign than a regional football poll where six nominees split a few hundred votes and a 54% majority wins. At this scale, winning requires pulling from a real community — sports boosters, school alumni, friends of the athlete, and the kind of extended family networks that San Antonio schools draw on — not grinding one device through the weekend.

East Central is a 5A school on the east side of San Antonio, not one of the city's 6A flagships. That Holton took half the vote in a 25-name statewide field from there is worth reading carefully: it means the structural advantage in this poll goes to a mobilized community, not to the school with the highest enrollment. A concentrated fanbase that is aware, organized, and voting across the full week beats a large school whose fans are spread across different sports and do not all know the same athlete is on the ballot this week.

The field: 20 to 25 nominees, every sport, all of Texas

The February 3, 2025 ballot had 25 nominees from across the state. The sports on a single list that week: boys basketball, girls basketball, girls swimming, boys wrestling, girls wrestling, boys soccer. Seven days later a nominee from an entirely different sport could anchor the lead. The March 25, 2025 ballot had 20 nominees in baseball, softball, boys and girls soccer, track and field, tennis, and golf simultaneously.

What this means in practice: your nominee's support group is competing not just against other basketball communities or other soccer communities, but against every other sport's fans on a single ballot at the same time. A tennis player's family from League City Clear Creek is in the same vote-split as a girls basketball player from Lancaster and a boys soccer player from Fort Worth Diamond Hill-Jarvis. The nominee whose community votes together regardless of sport representation in the field is the one that clears the pack.

The geographical spread is just as wide. Confirmed nominees on these ballots came from El Paso, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Lubbock, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and DFW in the same week. That is a statewide audience for the poll but a hyper-local audience for each nominee's actual fan base — and the hyper-local communities, when they organize, are the ones that show up in the final tally.

Running a real campaign across a statewide, multi-sport ballot

The Texas Athlete of the Week is won differently depending on whether it is February or April when your nominee appears. Getting that calendar right is step one.

During basketball season (unlimited cap): the full week is in play, and returning voters matter. The job is keeping the link circulating from the day the ballot opens — typically the day after the performance — through the Sunday close. Share when it opens, share mid-week, share the morning of close. A community that votes steadily across five or six days can accumulate the kind of total Holton's East Central supporters built.

During spring season (one vote per six hours): the calculus shifts. Each individual can vote at most four times per day, which means raw volume from a small group tops out quickly. The spring cap makes breadth the decisive variable — the nominee who reaches 1,000 unique supporters wins over the one whose 100 most loyal fans voted the maximum. Outreach to people who will vote once is worth more here than outreach to the same people who will vote twelve times.

In both seasons, submitting nominations early helps. SI's editors take stat lines at bob.lundeberg@gmail.com; a strong performance submitted by Saturday night with the full stat line and the opponent is more likely to make that week's ballot than one submitted late Sunday.

For the full picture of how Texas fan votes work across sports and regions, the Texas contest directory collects every confirmed poll, and the national guide covers multi-sport AOTW polls in other states for comparison. For the general mechanics of running a weekly fan-vote campaign, the how-to guide covers the recurring-poll cadence that applies here across every season.