Gadsden Times Postseason Boys Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gadsden Times postseason boys basketball award is

The Gadsden Times, the daily newspaper in Gadsden, Alabama, hands its readers a season-ending boys basketball honor: the Postseason Player of the Year, decided entirely by public vote. The award sits inside the newspaper's high school sports desk, and it turns the end of the boys basketball season into a single question for its readers: which player across the coverage area deserves the postseason honor?

Crowdsignal, at poll.fm, hosts the ballot, the same platform The Gadsden Times uses for its fan-choice sports voting. The live address is poll.fm/15156663, and the 2025 edition of that page carried the full nominee list, each player paired with his school, alongside a running percentage tally. The nominees come from high schools across the paper's northeast Alabama coverage area, with communities such as Gadsden, Fort Payne, Guntersville, Albertville, Glencoe, Ashville and Piedmont represented on the 2025 ballot.

The whole program is a straightforward public vote. There is no nomination round for supporters to work through and no panel of judges; the newspaper selects the nominees and the readers decide the winner. That makes the program different from a business-of-the-year contest or a restaurant bracket, because the choice is purely athletic and the audience is the paper's high school sports readership.

When the ballot runs and what the newspaper has not published

The 2023 and 2025 runs are the confirmed editions of this program. Those two years make the postseason boys basketball ballot a recurring fixture instead of a one-off; 2025 is the latest run, which points to 2026 as the expected next cycle. The confirmed window falls in March, so the ballot sits at the end of the Alabama high school basketball season rather than in the middle of it.

The 2025 ballot closed with a clear result: the leading nominee finished at 50 percent on 19,065 votes, and the runner-up held 35 percent on 13,084. The page title marked the poll as closed once voting ended, which is how supporters can tell a finished edition from a live one.

Several facts are not printed anywhere ahead of the poll. The newspaper has not published the exact opening and closing dates of the March window; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The nominee roster goes up only when the ballot itself goes live, and the newspaper has not printed a standalone rule sheet for this program beyond its fan-vote instruction that participants can vote once each day. There is also no published nomination or entry round for supporters to influence.

For a supporter planning around the award, the practical reading is this: expect the ballot in March, expect a single-award format, and expect the daily-return rule the newspaper applies to its fan-choice voting. Everything more specific than that is settled when the paper publishes the new poll.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

Voting happens at poll.fm/15156663, the Crowdsignal address The Gadsden Times promotes for this award. A supporter opens the page during the March window and finds the nominee list: high school boys basketball players from across the paper's coverage area, each shown with his school. The 2025 ballot listed players from schools in Gadsden, Fort Payne, Guntersville, Albertville, Glencoe, Ashville, Piedmont and the surrounding communities.

The action itself is simple. Mark the circle next to the chosen player, then submit the choice on the poll.fm ballot. The selection is logged immediately and the percentage tally on the page updates, which is how the 2025 edition displayed its live split between the top two nominees while voting ran.

The newspaper's fan-vote instruction, stated on its fan-choice coverage, asks participants to vote once each day. That makes this a daily-return ballot rather than a single-choice one: a supporter who wants to keep building a nominee's total comes back the following day and votes again, and repeats that through the window. No account or registration step is published for the ballot, and no separate category pages exist, because the whole program is one award on one page.

Because the closing date is not announced in advance, the safest habit is to vote early in the window rather than saving support for a final-day push that may land after the poll has already closed.

Where this ballot sits among the other Alabama programs

This postseason honor belongs to a family of high school sports ballots that share The Gadsden Times' platform for Alabama readers, and this one stands alone in that family as the season-ending boys basketball honor for the Gadsden area. The neighbours are broader in scope: a statewide boys basketball award, a weekly baseball honor, a weekly football honor, a football postseason award and a girls basketball weekly vote all run under the same publisher family on the same host.

The difference that matters to a supporter is cadence and geography. The weekly programs reset their nominee lists every seven days during a season, so momentum has to be rebuilt from scratch each week. This postseason ballot is a single March decision, which means a campaign can concentrate its whole effort on one window. It is also anchored to the Gadsden Times' coverage area, so the nominee pool is local, while the statewide ballots draw from schools across all of Alabama.

For a school community in the towns that appeared on the 2025 ballot, this is the ballot where local turnout carries the most weight per vote, because the pool of competitors is the paper's own readership rather than the entire state.

Building support for a nominee in this ballot

The mechanic rewards consistency. Because The Gadsden Times asks participants to vote once each day, a nominee's supporters should treat the March window as a sequence of daily asks, not a single blast: one vote per person, repeated across as many days as the ballot stays open. A school that organizes its families to return daily will outpace a larger group that votes once and forgets.

Timing matters too. The newspaper does not publish the closing date ahead of the poll, so a campaign that waits for a final-day surge risks arriving after the ballot has closed. Start the day the paper announces the nominees, and keep the poll.fm link circulating directly rather than sending people hunting for it.

On outside help: the newspaper has not printed a dedicated policy statement for this ballot beyond its daily-vote instruction, so the organizer's published rule is the only published constraint. The get more votes online guide walks through campaign structures that fit a daily-return newspaper poll, and the award vote support page explains the options specific to player-of-the-year ballots like this one.