In the world of professional wrestling, one of the fun moments in any year is when a wrestler who has been injured or absent for a while makes their triumphant return.

Their familiar theme music hits. The fans recognize it a second later and erupt. The wrestler walks out on the stage as the cheers grow louder. Business, as the saying goes, picks up.

I’m not sure what the theme music is for The Vicksburg Post’s Athlete of the Week contest is — it could be anything from a carnival theme to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”; that might be another column for another day — but it just hit and business is about to pick up.

We introduced Athlete of the Week last year to great success. Over the course of 33 weeks, more than 27,500 votes were cast — an average of more than 800 per week — as four local athletes competed in an online poll for the honor.
Now that all four Warren County high schools are in the full swing of their summer/fall seasons, it’s time to bring it back. This weekend will mark the start of the 2023-24 Athlete of the Week competition.

To recap, the concept and rules are simple. The idea behind Athlete of the Week is to recognize four local athletes as nominees for their accomplishments during the previous week. It’s a companion piece to our long-running Who’s Hot feature, taken to the next level.

The four nominees are mostly from Warren County’s high schools, but youth and college players are eligible as are those from places like Tallulah and Port Gibson. Athletes from all sports are eligible as well. Our 34 winners during the 2022-23 school year included players in 10 different sports. We try not to pick more than one nominee from each school.

Our readers then select the winners through an online poll on our website, VicksburgPost.com. The voting begins on Sunday afternoon and continues through midnight Tuesday each week. The athlete who gets the most votes is the winner, and is recognized both online and in our Friday print edition. Much celebration in their household ensues.

We’ll start the first Athlete of the Week contest this Sunday and continue it through May, with a brief break around the December holiday season. It was a bit of an experiment last year, but hopefully it can become an entrenched tradition in year two.

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Ernest Bowker is the sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com