Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week — what the contest is and who runs it

The Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week is a free reader-engagement poll published weekly at desmoinesregister.com throughout every Iowa high school sports season. The Register's sports desk — part of Gannett's USA TODAY Network, the largest newspaper chain in the United States — nominates standout athletes from Central Iowa and the broader Des Moines metro, then opens the ballot to public fan voting. The Des Moines Register is Iowa's largest newspaper, reaching hundreds of thousands of monthly readers across Polk, Dallas, Warren, and Story counties.

• Operated by the Des Moines Register (Gannett / USA TODAY Network) — Iowa's largest daily, with statewide digital and print reach.
• Poll hosted at desmoinesregister.com in the High School Sports section; no subscription or account required to vote.
• Covers all three Iowa HS sports seasons — fall, winter, and spring/summer — and all IHSAA/IGHSAU-sanctioned sports within each.
• Vote cap: one vote per hour per device, enforced by the Gannett poll widget; live totals display throughout the window.
• Coverage draws from the Central Iowa Metro League (CIML), the Iowa Alliance Conference (IAC), the Little Hawkeye Conference, and independent metro-area schools.
• Monthly navigational search demand for this contest is estimated at approximately 90 searches per month, reflecting consistent community engagement during every active season.
• The winner earns a published mention on desmoinesregister.com and across the Register's social channels — a third-party credential that appears in recruiting profiles.

Which Central Iowa schools and conferences compete in this poll?

The Des Moines Register draws nominees from across the entire Central Iowa metro, spanning four distinct athletic conferences and a handful of independent programmes. Since the major CIML realignment in the 2022–23 school year — when ten schools departed to form two new conferences — the competitive landscape has been split into separate leagues, each with its own playoff track under IHSAA and IGHSAU. All four conference groups regularly produce Register Athlete of the Week nominees.

How the 2022–23 realignment reshaped the Central Iowa landscape

Before the 2022–23 school year, the CIML was a larger conference that included the Des Moines Public Schools and several other programmes. Ten schools departed for competitive-balance reasons — the five DMPS schools (East, Hoover, Lincoln, North, Roosevelt) joined Ames, Fort Dodge, Marshalltown, Mason City, and Ottumwa in a new Iowa Alliance Conference. The remaining nine CIML schools — Valley, Dowling Catholic, Waukee, Waukee Northwest, Ankeny, Ankeny Centennial, Johnston, Southeast Polk, and Urbandale — now compete in a true round-robin format, no longer divided into separate divisions.

The CIML nine are predominantly large suburban Class 5A and 4A programmes with enrolments of 1,500 to 3,000+ students. Valley and Dowling Catholic are perennial state contenders across multiple sports. Ankeny and Ankeny Centennial are two schools serving the same fast-growing north Des Moines suburb. Waukee and Waukee Northwest similarly split the booming west-side Waukee district — both schools opened fully by 2021–22. This cluster of large-enrolment suburban schools produces well-organised booster clubs and active parent networks, which directly affects how Register poll vote totals develop each week.

How does the Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week vote work?

The poll is embedded in the High School Sports section at desmoinesregister.com and runs on the standard Gannett poll widget used across the USA TODAY Network. Visiting the page, finding the active poll, clicking a nominee's name, and submitting is all it takes — no subscription, no account, and no email address required. For a general overview of how online newspaper fan polls like this function, see our guide to online contest voting.

The platform enforces one vote per hour per device. Each phone, tablet, and desktop browser registers as a separate voting surface. Three devices in a single household can each cast a vote in the same hour, then all three can vote again the following hour — producing a combined per-hour rate of three votes, entirely within the cap rules. The hourly cooldown resets automatically; the widget indicates when the next vote on that device is available.

The poll window typically spans two to three days, opening Monday or Tuesday after the sports desk reviews weekend results, then closing Thursday or Friday. The exact close time is displayed on the widget — it is not fixed to a single hour and can shift around Iowa tournament scheduling or holiday weeks. Votes are visible in near-real-time, so supporters can track standings hour by hour during the open window.

How is the Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week winner decided?

The winner is the nominee with the highest vote count when the poll closes — a pure fan vote with no editorial panel, no weighted score, and no tie-breaking mechanism beyond total votes. The Register sports desk exercises editorial discretion only over which athletes appear on the ballot, not over the outcome once voting begins.

1. Performance submissions: coaches, parents, and school athletic contacts email outstanding results to the Register sports desk after weekend and early-week competition. There is no formal online submission form; the standard approach is a direct email to the sports department with box-score stats, game context, and a brief coach quote.
2. Editorial ballot selection: the sports desk curates that week's nominees by merit — not every submission earns a spot. Appearing on the ballot already signals a standout performance at a regional level.
3. Open poll: the ballot goes live at desmoinesregister.com, typically Monday or Tuesday, with each nominee's name, school, and sport displayed alongside a live running tally.
4. Winner announced: when the poll closes, the Register publishes the winner on desmoinesregister.com and its social channels. Vote count alone decides — there is no override.

There is no physical trophy or cash prize. The value is a published Gannett byline in Iowa's largest newspaper — a reputational credential that is searchable, shareable, and meaningful on recruiting materials for athletes competing in the dense Central Iowa prep market.

Building vote totals for Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week

Every campaign for this poll runs the same hourly arithmetic: more voting devices, active earlier and more consistently, produce larger totals. The first and most important action is placing the direct poll URL — not just the athlete's name — in front of every realistic contact. Organisational specifics for Central Iowa's conference structure follow. For general tactics that apply across all online poll formats, see our step-by-step voting guide.

Two Central Iowa patterns consistently move the needle. First, the Dowling Catholic community on the west side of Des Moines — with deep Catholic parish networks spanning multiple west-side and suburban communities, well beyond the current student body — produces broad reach when activated early. Second, the paired Ankeny and Waukee school clusters each have two large schools (Ankeny / Ankeny Centennial; Waukee / Waukee Northwest) competing in the same fast-growing suburbs. When an athlete from one of these schools is nominated, rival-school supporters and their shared community networks can both be engaged, not just the nominating school's families.

When every realistic organic network has been reached and the nominee is still behind, some families and booster clubs use a paid vote promotion service to extend reach to additional real voters. If you take that route, choose a service that delivers genuine, paced votes matched to the hourly cap structure — rapid injection of volume in a short window produces detectable patterns and risks vote removal. Our sports fan poll service is built around cap-matched delivery for exactly this format.

Rules and the buy-votes question for the Des Moines Register poll

The Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week is a newspaper reader-engagement fan poll — not a commercial sweepstakes, not a regulated election, and not subject to Iowa prize-promotion law. There is no cash prize, no entry fee, and no legal framework beyond the poll platform's own technical terms. For a broader, balanced discussion of the legality of vote promotion across online polls, see our full guide; the notes here are specific to this poll format.

There is a meaningful operational distinction between two categories of activity:

• Automated scripts and bots — rapid-fire requests from the same device fingerprint or IP range that bypass or ignore the one-hour cooldown. These violate standard Gannett poll terms, produce detectable traffic patterns, and result in vote removal when flagged.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting genuine votes within the hourly cap, from their own devices. Structurally this is identical to a booster club email reaching five hundred additional families — it is fans voting, accessed through a different channel.

Whether that structural distinction satisfies the spirit of any specific poll's terms is a judgement each entrant must make after reading the current official poll page. Athletes, families, and booster clubs should weigh the reputational value of a win honestly against the nature of any assistance they consider using. The risk in this format — a newspaper fan poll with no prize and no formal contest-law framework — is reputational rather than legal.

Des Moines Register Athlete of the Week season timeline and Iowa HS calendar

The poll runs throughout all three seasons sanctioned by the IHSAA (Iowa High School Athletic Association, governing boys sports) and the IGHSAU (Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, governing girls sports). Iowa's calendar has some distinctive features — most notably, high school baseball and softball extend well into July, making Iowa's spring/summer season longer than in most states. The table below maps the poll to the Iowa HS sports year.

Within each week, the pattern is consistent: the Register sports desk reviews results from the preceding weekend, compiles the ballot, and opens the poll Monday or Tuesday. The poll then runs until Thursday or Friday afternoon — the close time is shown on the widget and may shift for holiday weeks or state-tournament scheduling.

Fall is the most intensely contested season for this poll. CIML schools' football communities — Valley's large alumni base, Dowling Catholic's multi-generational Catholic-school network, the rapidly growing Ankeny and Waukee communities — each mobilise aggressively for football nominees. Spring track-and-field and baseball weeks can be decided with a few hundred votes; contested October football weeks regularly see totals many times higher. Check the live poll leaderboard mid-window to benchmark the competitive level of the specific week before calibrating your effort.

For the broader Iowa voting-contest landscape — covering school elections, community recognition polls, and other IHSAA-season contests — see our Iowa contest hub. For the full US contest guide index, visit our USA guide index.