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

What is the 92.9 The Ticket Maine High School Athlete of the Week?

The Maine High School Athlete of the Week is a free statewide fan-vote poll administered by 92.9 The Ticket — the ESPN Sports Radio affiliate operated by Townsquare Media in Bangor, Maine. Each week of the Maine Principals' Association (MPA) athletic calendar, the station's sports staff selects nominees based on performances submitted by coaches, parents, and fans from anywhere in the state, then opens a public ballot at 929theticket.com for community voting.

• Hosted at 929theticket.com, Townsquare Media Bangor's digital platform, which serves sports-talk listeners statewide from Kittery to Fort Kent.
• Covers all MPA classes — Class A, B, C, and D — and both North and South regions, giving small-school athletes from Aroostook County the same platform as Portland-area Class A programmes.
• Runs across all three MPA sports seasons: fall (late August through November), winter (November through March), and spring (March through June).
• The vote cap is one vote per device per day; no email address, account, or personal information is required to participate.
• Winners are announced each Friday on 929theticket.com and during on-air sports segments — recognition that carries weight in Maine's tightly knit prep-sports community.

Because 92.9 The Ticket is the only statewide sports-radio outlet consistently running this format, a win here reaches Maine fans from York County to Washington County — a much broader footprint than any single-county newspaper poll.

Which Maine high schools compete in this statewide poll?

Unlike regional newspaper polls that concentrate on a single metro area, the 92.9 The Ticket poll draws nominees from all corners of Maine — from large Class A schools in the Portland and Bangor metros to Class C and D programmes in rural Aroostook, Washington, and Oxford counties. The table below lists representative schools by MPA class and region that appear regularly in the nominee pool.

The MPA classifies Maine high schools from Class A (largest enrolment, 670+ students) down to Class D (smallest rural programmes, sometimes under 100 students). Each class is further split into North and South regions for most sports — the North region is anchored by Bangor, while the South region draws from the Portland metro and surrounding York and Cumberland counties.

Smaller rural schools in Class C and D — including programmes from Washington County, Aroostook County, and the western mountains — appear regularly on the ballot. The statewide scope means a dominant performance from a Caribou or Bucksport athlete can compete for the same recognition as a Thornton Academy or Bangor athlete — something no metro-only poll offers.

How does Maine Athlete of the Week voting work at 929theticket.com?

The poll lives inside the High School Sports section at 929theticket.com and is free to vote in — no subscription, no account, and no personal data of any kind required. Each nominee is listed by name, school, and sport alongside a brief description of the performance that earned the nomination. For a plain-language overview of how online fan polls like this operate in general, see our guide to online contest voting.

The platform enforces one vote per device per day — a daily cap rather than the hourly cap used by some other newspaper polls. That means a single phone can cast one vote on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and one more on Thursday before the midnight close — four total votes from a single device across the full window. A household with multiple phones, a tablet, and a laptop each votes as a separate surface under the daily cap, so coordinating across several devices from Tuesday through Thursday produces meaningful legitimate totals.

Voting typically opens early in the week after the sports staff reviews weekend and early-week results, and closes at midnight Thursday. The winner is announced on Friday at 929theticket.com and during on-air segments. The exact open and close times are displayed on each individual poll post — always verify there rather than assuming a fixed schedule, as timing can shift around holidays and tournament weeks.

The poll is accessible from anywhere in the world — family members in Boston, military parents overseas, and college alumni can all vote just as easily as fans in Bangor or Portland. Share the direct link to the specific poll post (not just the homepage) so supporters can find the ballot without searching.

How is the Maine Athlete of the Week winner chosen?

Winning is determined entirely by the fan vote count when Thursday's midnight deadline passes. The 92.9 The Ticket sports staff controls who appears on the ballot through their editorial nomination process, but once the poll is live, the nominee with the most votes wins — no panel weighting, no editorial override, no tiebreaker beyond raw totals.

1. Nomination: coaches, parents, and fans email performance highlights to the 92.9 The Ticket sports desk. The submission should include the athlete's name, school, sport, stat summary, and brief context about why the performance stands out.
2. Ballot curation: the sports staff reviews all submissions and selects a weekly nominee pool by editorial judgement. Appearing on the ballot is itself a form of recognition — not every submission earns a spot.
3. Open voting: the poll goes live at 929theticket.com, typically Monday or Tuesday, with all nominees visible and real-time totals updating as votes arrive.
4. Result: at midnight Thursday, voting closes. The nominee with the highest total is named Maine High School Athlete of the Week, announced Friday on-air and published on 929theticket.com.

There is no physical award or cash prize — the value is the statewide published recognition, the on-air mention heard by Maine's prep-sports community, and the 929theticket.com article that surfaces in search results when coaches or recruiters look up the athlete's name.

How do you build a winning vote total for Maine's Athlete of the Week?

Maine's daily voting cap means the winning strategy is about breadth of network and consistency across the full window — not a single day's surge. The first action is always distributing the direct poll link (the specific 929theticket.com poll post, not the homepage) to every realistic network as soon as voting opens. For general tactics on maximising online poll vote totals, read our full guide; the Maine-specific notes below reflect what actually moves the needle in this market.

Maine-specific network channels that convert well

Two Maine-specific patterns produce outsized results. First, Maine's rural school communities — Hermon, Orono, Bucksport, Caribou, MDI — have proportionally very high Facebook-group engagement relative to their population size. A single post in the right Hancock County or Aroostook County Facebook group can mobilise fans who check these groups daily. Second, the daily cap (rather than hourly) means campaigns that start strong on Monday and maintain consistent daily reminders through Wednesday night regularly outperform late-starting surges that try to make up ground on Thursday alone.

When all organic networks have been fully activated and the nominee is still trailing, some families and boosters use a paid vote promotion service to reach additional real voters. If you take that route, choose a service that delivers votes paced to match the daily cap — our sports fan poll votes service is built for exactly this kind of daily-cap-matched delivery.

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

The 92.9 The Ticket Athlete of the Week is a reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize and no formal Maine lottery or prize-promotion law framework attached. The relevant restrictions are the platform's own technical terms — most specifically the prohibition on automated tools that circumvent the daily voting cap. For a thorough, balanced treatment of online poll legality in general, see our buy-votes guide.

There is a practical distinction between two different categories of activity:

• Automated scripts or bots — software that fires multiple requests from the same device fingerprint within the daily cooldown window, or rotates through VPN addresses to simulate new devices. These patterns are technically detectable, violate standard poll terms, and result in vote removal.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting genuine daily votes from their own devices within the stated cap. This is structurally identical to a booster-club email reaching three hundred extra families — it is fans voting, reached through a paid channel rather than an organic one.

Whether paid real-voter outreach satisfies the spirit of any particular poll's terms is a judgement each entrant must make after reading the current official ballot page. In this format — a community fan poll with no prize and no formal contest law framework — the risk is reputational rather than legal. Athletes, families, and school communities should weigh that honestly.

When does Maine Athlete of the Week voting open and close — and how does the MPA season shape it?

The poll follows the Maine Principals' Association (MPA) athletic calendar, running a new ballot each week that school sports are in session. Each season produces a distinct cadence, a different set of competing schools, and a different typical vote volume. The table below maps the poll to the Maine prep-sports calendar.

Within each week, voting opens Monday or Tuesday after the sports staff reviews results, and closes at midnight Thursday. The daily cap means every day of the voting window matters equally — a campaign that starts voting on Monday and continues consistently through Thursday generates four times the per-device total of a campaign that only mobilises on Thursday.

Fall is typically the most competitive season because football has the largest Maine fan base and the booster-club infrastructure at Class A South programmes like Thornton Academy, Scarborough, and Cheverus is well organised. Winter basketball weeks — especially at Class A North schools in the Bangor area — also produce strong vote totals. Spring weeks, particularly in track and field, can be more competitive for smaller Class C and D schools whose tight-knit rural communities respond enthusiastically when one of their own makes the ballot.

For more on Maine prep-sports contests and other state recognition polls, visit the Maine contest hub. For the full US index of athlete-of-the-week guides, see our USA contest guide index.