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

What is the Delaware High School Athlete of the Week?

The Delaware High School Athlete of the Week — officially presented by Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists — is a free weekly fan poll published at delawareonline.com each week of the DIAA-sanctioned high school sports calendar. Delaware Online, the digital platform of The News Journal, is part of Gannett's USA TODAY Network; the sports desk selects nominees based on performance submissions from coaches, parents, and school contacts, then opens the ballot to statewide public voting.

• Presented by Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists, a multi-location orthopaedic practice serving patients across New Castle, Kent, and Sussex counties.
• Hosted at delawareonline.com, The News Journal's digital home and the dominant statewide Delaware news platform within Gannett's USA TODAY Network.
• Covers all three DIAA sports seasons — fall, winter, and spring — across every DIAA-sanctioned sport within each season.
• Voting is unlimited per device; no account, email address, or registration is required to cast votes.
• Winners are announced on delawareonline.com each Friday, with recognition shared across The News Journal's social channels and high school sports coverage.
• Nominations for Athlete of the Week are accepted by the Delaware Online sports desk; coaches, parents, and athletic contacts submit performance highlights directly to staff reporters.

Because Delaware is a single-newspaper-market state served by one dominant Gannett daily, a win in this poll carries genuine statewide visibility — any coach or recruiter following Delaware prep sports will encounter the winner's name in The News Journal's digital coverage.

Which Delaware schools and DIAA classes compete in this poll?

The Delaware Online poll draws nominees from all DIAA member schools across New Castle, Kent, and Sussex counties. The DIAA divides schools into Division I (enrollment ≥1,104 grades 9–12 for the 2025–2027 cycle) and Division II (all other schools). Football runs a separate three-tier system — 3A, 2A, and 1A — based on enrollment and geography. All DIAA sports and all divisions are eligible for the Athlete of the Week ballot regardless of class.

New Castle County generates the largest share of nominees by volume — it holds Delaware's highest population concentration and its schools include some of the state's most historically successful athletic programmes. Salesianum, an all-boys Catholic school in Wilmington, consistently produces nominees across football, basketball, swimming, and track. Smyrna and Middletown, both growing suburban Div. I schools, have built strong football and fall-sport reputations that translate directly into ballot appearances.

Sussex County — largely rural, with Cape Henlopen and Sussex Central as its anchor programmes — produces strong fall-sport nominees, particularly in football and soccer. The two vocational-technical schools on the ballot, Sussex Tech and Hodgson, compete in Div. II but field athletes who regularly surface in The News Journal's weekly coverage. Charter School of Wilmington and Sanford School are both Div. II academic-focused independents that produce notable nominees in swimming and track.

How does the Delaware Online Athlete of the Week vote actually work?

The poll lives inside the High School Sports section at delawareonline.com and costs nothing to enter — no subscription to The News Journal, no account creation, and no personal data of any kind. The Gannett poll widget displays each nominee with their name, school, and sport, alongside a running tally visible to any visitor throughout the open window. For a general explanation of how online newspaper fan polls function, see our guide to online contest voting.

Unlike some Gannett-network polls that enforce an hourly vote cap, the Delaware Online poll operates with unlimited voting per device across the Monday-to-Thursday window. This means total mobilisation effort — how many people you reach, and how consistently they vote over four days — matters more than careful hourly timing. A single motivated household or booster network voting continuously can accumulate a substantial total.

The window opens Monday and closes Thursday, with the winner published on Friday. Voting is device-based with no login requirement, which means every phone, tablet, and laptop represents a separate voting surface with no shared cap. The poll is accessible from anywhere — family outside Delaware, college contacts, extended social networks — all can vote without geographic restriction.

How is the winner selected?

The nominee with the highest vote count when Thursday's poll closes is named that week's Athlete of the Week — a pure popular vote with no editorial weighting applied after the ballot goes live. The News Journal sports desk exercises judgment only during the nomination stage, not the outcome.

From nomination to recognition

1. Submission: coaches, parents, and athletic contacts send outstanding performance highlights to the Delaware Online sports desk, typically by email, covering weekend and early-week results.
2. Editorial selection: the sports desk curates the nominee shortlist by editorial judgement — athletes on the ballot have already been recognised as performing at a notable level that week.
3. Public vote: the ballot opens Monday at delawareonline.com; any visitor can vote without restriction until Thursday close.
4. Winner announced: Friday, published at delawareonline.com with recognition on social media and in The News Journal's high school sports coverage for that week.

Because Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists is the presenting sponsor, the recognition carries a named brand credential — "Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists Athlete of the Week" — which adds weight to a college application portfolio or recruiting profile compared to an unsponsored poll result.

There is no cash prize or physical trophy. The value is reputational: a published, searchable mention in a Gannett regional outlet that reaches coaches and scouts monitoring Delaware prep sports, plus the social-media amplification The News Journal provides winners.

How do you build a strong vote total for your Delaware Athlete of the Week nominee?

With unlimited voting per device across a four-day window, the arithmetic is straightforward: more devices voting more consistently across Monday through Thursday produces more votes. The strategic question is how quickly and completely you activate every realistic network. For general contest-voting strategy, our how-to guides cover the fundamentals; the Delaware-specific notes below reflect what actually moves totals in this statewide market.

Two Delaware-specific patterns consistently produce outsized results. First, the Catholic school networks — Salesianum, St. Mark's — combine disciplined alumni organisations with wide statewide reach that extends well beyond the current student body. A single message from a booster parent into an alumni network can reach former graduates across all three counties within hours. Second, because Delaware is geographically compact, family networks for any school tend to be locally concentrated — parents at a Sussex County school like Cape Henlopen or Sussex Central know each other personally and mobilise through direct text chains rather than large Facebook groups, making individual asks more effective than broadcast posts.

When every organic network has been activated and a nominee is still trailing, some families and programmes use a paid vote promotion service to extend their reach to additional real voters. If you consider that route, choose a service that delivers genuine paced votes within the open window. Our sports fan poll service handles volume delivery for open-format polls like this one.

What are the rules — and can you buy votes for Delaware Online Athlete of the Week?

The Delaware Online Athlete of the Week is a reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize and no formal contest law framework under Delaware statutes. The operative restrictions are the poll platform's own technical terms, which vary by implementation but generally prohibit automated tools that generate artificial traffic. For a full analysis of how contest poll rules apply across different formats, see our detailed buy-votes guide.

The distinction that matters

There are two meaningfully different types of activity that both fall under the informal label of "buying votes":

• Automated bot traffic — rapid-fire programmatic requests that generate hundreds or thousands of votes from device fingerprints that no human is controlling. These violate poll platform terms, produce detectable traffic signatures, and result in vote removal.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting genuine manual votes from their own devices across the open window. Structurally, this is identical to a booster email reaching additional families who choose to vote. The votes are real; the channel of reaching them is paid.

Whether paid outreach satisfies the spirit of this particular poll's terms is a judgement each entrant must make after reading the current official page at delawareonline.com. Delaware Online runs a recognition poll with community goodwill as its primary output — the reputational stakes are real, even if the legal exposure is not.

When does Delaware High School Athlete of the Week voting open and how does nomination work?

The poll follows the DIAA academic-year sports calendar, running every week across all three athletic seasons. The voting window is consistent: polls open on Monday and close Thursday, with results published Friday. Here is how the programme maps to the Delaware sports year.

To nominate an athlete, submit performance highlights to the Delaware Online sports desk by email, including the athlete's name, school, sport, a stat summary or box score, game context, and a brief coach quote. The sports desk makes final ballot selections by editorial judgement — not every submission earns a spot. Submitting early in the week, covering weekend results promptly, gives a nomination the best chance of making the current week's ballot rather than being held for a later week.

Fall is typically the most competitive season for vote totals. Football weeks in October — particularly involving Salesianum, Smyrna, or Middletown, whose booster networks are the most organised — produce the year's highest vote counts. Spring swimming and track weeks can be decided with far smaller totals when seasonal engagement drops.

For context on other Delaware-based contests and state-level recognition polls, visit our Delaware contest guide. To explore the full US contest index by state, see the USA contest hub.