Fan Gadsden Times Flag Football Preseason Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gadsden Times flag football preseason fan vote is

The Gadsden Times, the daily newspaper based in Gadsden, Alabama, runs the Fan Gadsden Times Flag Football Preseason Player of the Year as one of its reader awards. It sits in the newspaper's Fan Vote family: before the high school flag football season starts, the sports desk names a watch list of area players and hands the choice of a preseason standout to its audience. The honor covers girls flag football, a sport the AHSAA sanctions, and the nominees come from high school programs in and around Gadsden, Albertville and Boaz.

Crowdsignal provides the voting infrastructure, hosting the ballot at poll.fm/14237540 as it does the newspaper's other fan ballots. The page carries the Fan Vote header readers see across the series. Because the host is a general polling platform rather than a custom contest site, the ballot is plain: a list of nominees, a way to select, and a submit action. In the newspaper's announcement of the most recent cycle, The Gadsden Times stated that the poll closes on August 20th at noon CT.

The dated trail for this Alabama flag football ballot

The 2023 and 2024 runs are both confirmed, which makes the preseason player of the year a recurring fixture of The Gadsden Times' August sports coverage rather than a standalone promotion. The voting window sits in August each cycle, ahead of the flag football season the award previews, and the newspaper's story promoting the latest ballot closes with a concrete deadline: the poll closes on August 20th at noon CT. That deadline, printed by the organizer, is the firmest date attached to the program.

Beyond that, the printed trail is thin in specific places. The Gadsden Times has not published the ballot's opening date, any ceiling on repeat voting, a category list, or the year the next preseason edition will run; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The ballot page itself signals its own state plainly: between cycles the title reads Poll Closed, so the page's own title shows immediately whether the August window is live. The announcement story also mentions that the newspaper put a watch list of 17 players forward before the vote opened, which fixes the size of the field for that edition without describing how later fields are assembled.

How a supporter votes in the preseason poll today

The supporter's job during a live window is short. Open the ballot at poll.fm/14237540, scan the nominee list The Gadsden Times published with its announcement, and select the flag football player you want to recognize. Each nominee appears beside her school's town, so a supporter from Gadsden, Albertville or Boaz can find their pick quickly even without reading the full roster. Crowdsignal ballots log the choice through the page's own selection control and submit action, and the form works the same on a phone as on a desktop, which matters for a school-community vote where most supporters arrive from social feeds on mobile.

Timing is the part that trips people up. The poll closes on August 20th at noon CT, and once the deadline passes the page reverts to its Poll Closed label, so a selection made after the fact simply does not land. A supporter who intends to rally classmates, teammates or a fan base should time the outreach to the live days and stress that the noon CT cutoff is midday, not the end of the day. If the ballot shows a Poll Closed banner when you arrive, the honest answer is that this edition has finished and the next preseason list has not been announced yet.

Where this ballot sits among Alabama's other fan votes

The Gadsden Times' flag football preseason ballot is part of a wider Alabama fan-vote scene, and its nearest neighbours are the state high school player ballots on this site. Alabama runs weekly and yearly honors for football and basketball in both genders, plus a baseball player of the week, and each of those lives on its own page: the Alabama High School Football Player of the Year, the football player of the week, the boys basketball player of the year, the boys basketball weekly ballot, the girls basketball weekly ballot and the baseball player of the week.

What separates the Gadsden Times program from those state ballots is scope and season. The newspaper's honor is a market award: its nominee pool is drawn from schools around Gadsden, Albertville and Boaz rather than from the whole state, and it runs as a preseason vote in August, previewing the flag football season, where the statewide ballots track results during their own sports' calendars. That difference matters for anyone choosing where to spend effort: a smaller, local nominee field concentrates attention on a handful of schools, and a community that organizes early in the August window is competing for a single hometown honor rather than a statewide title.

Strengthening support in a Gadsden Times preseason poll

Because this ballot is a local newspaper poll with a modest nominee field, the support that moves it comes from real people in a small geographic circle. The workable playbook for a Gadsden, Albertville or Boaz family is to concentrate outreach in the days the window is actually open: share the poll.fm link directly from the newspaper's announcement so supporters land on the right ballot, remind the school community that the poll closes on August 20th at noon CT, and ask teammates and classmates to cast their pick before the midday cutoff rather than after. The Gadsden Times has published nothing about outside voting help or automated tools for this ballot, which means the only safe assumption is that votes behaving like ordinary reader participation are the votes that stand. If you want background on what strengthening support generally involves for small community ballots, our award votes overview explains the terrain without promising outcomes. Keep the effort anchored to the live window, because the Poll Closed label returns quickly once the August deadline passes.