Fan vote for The Tuscaloosa News' preseason high school football player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Tuscaloosa News preseason fan vote is and who runs it

This page covers a single ballot: the fan vote The Tuscaloosa News stages before the football season, letting readers name a preseason player of the year for area high school football. The contrast with the other Alabama programs listed on this site starts with the calendar. The newspaper's weekly and year-end ballots track a season as it unfolds, while this ballot concentrates on the weeks before kickoff, which is why its voting window falls in August.

The organizer is The Tuscaloosa News, the daily paper for Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Crowdsignal hosts the ballot on its poll.fm service, and the address to use is https://poll.fm/14235560, which is the ballot itself rather than a platform landing page. Voting works as a straight public poll: the page lists the nominees, each a football player the paper has named, and a reader picks a nominee and submits.

What separates this honor from a weekly award is scope. A player of the week vote rewards a single performance; a preseason player of the year vote asks readers to weigh a body of work before the season has even started. That makes the nominee list the heart of the ballot, and it means a supporter is endorsing the paper's editorial judgment as much as a player. Fixed details about the program sit in the table below.

Editions, window and what the paper leaves unpublished

The program has two confirmed edition years, 2023 and 2024. Both ran with their voting windows in August, which makes the preseason calendar the recurring anchor rather than a scheduling accident. The most recent ballot, poll 14235560, is headed Poll Closed, so the live voting window has ended. The ballot text itself carries the line "open until noon Monday, Jan. 19", which marks when the paper shut that round of voting.

Past those two years the paper has published nothing about future cycles: no announcement of a 2026 edition, no opening date, and no nomination window for the next round. Nominations do exist as a stage in the program, since the paper bases its player nominations on submissions for area football consideration, but when a coming edition would nominate has not been printed anywhere.

The fine print is also missing from the ballot page. The Tuscaloosa News prints neither a category list nor any per-supporter voting rule alongside this preseason ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters for anyone planning support, because a daily-return habit or a vote ceiling would change how a push should be paced, and neither the paper's sports desk nor the poll.fm page states either point today.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

Voting works as a straight public poll, and every step happens on the poll.fm ballot itself. A supporter opens https://poll.fm/14235560 in a browser. The page shows the program name and the list of nominees, each shown as a player name paired with a school. The supporter picks the nominee to endorse and submits, and the ballot registers the choice straight away. The ballot mentions no account requirement, and no sign-in step appears in the voting flow it describes.

Because the current poll is marked closed, a new visitor sees the closed heading rather than an active ballot; the same steps apply when The Tuscaloosa News opens its next preseason round. The format carries two practical consequences. The vote is open to the public, so taking part does not run through the newspaper's own site or its subscription pages. And the paper fixes the nominee list, so a campaign has to bring people to the ballot rather than add names to it.

For anyone backing a nominee, the useful preparation happens before the poll opens: knowing which player the paper has nominated, and having the poll.fm address ready, is worth more than any late push once the round has closed.

How this ballot sits beside its Alabama neighbours

Set this Tuscaloosa ballot beside the six Alabama programs on this site and the differences show quickly. Five of the six are statewide honors: the Alabama High School Football Player of the Week, the Alabama High School Football Player of the Year, the Alabama High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the Alabama High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week. Those ballots follow a season as it plays out, handing out recognition week by week.

There is also the Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Year program, which like the football year-end honor looks backward at a completed season. The Tuscaloosa ballot looks forward instead: it asks readers to judge players on past form and upcoming promise before the season begins, and it belongs to a single Tuscaloosa newspaper rather than a statewide program.

Timing is the practical difference. A weekly ballot returns within days, so a missed round costs little; the preseason vote offers a much shorter runway, and once it closes there is no later round in the same sport until the following August.

Strengthening support in this preseason poll

The August window is the defining constraint for anyone rallying support in The Tuscaloosa News' preseason fan vote. A short preseason runway rewards early, personal outreach: teammates, families and school communities can be pointed straight to the poll.fm ballot while the round is open, since a link sent after the close registers nothing. The nominees never change mid-round, so all outreach aims at the same named players the ballot already shows.

Nothing in the paper's coverage addresses outside help for this preseason ballot; the safe position is to treat the public vote as exactly that, genuine readers choosing among the named nominees. For a wider view of tactics that fit public ballots, see how to get more votes online, and for the rules picture around paid support read whether buying votes is legal.