People People's Choice Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the People People's Choice Player of the Year is and who runs it

Unlike the weekly player-of-the-week ballots published alongside it, the People People's Choice Player of the Year stands apart as a single award decided by one public vote rather than a rolling series of polls. The organizer is People, and the ballot runs on Crowdsignal at poll.fm, the same platform that carries the weekly Alabama high school ballots linked at the foot of this page. The voting URL for the program is https://poll.fm/17159002, which is the address of the 2026 edition.

The award sits in the sport vertical and covers high school athletes across Alabama. Its mechanic is a plain public vote: the ballot poses one question, lists the nominees, and asks readers to pick one. The 2026 edition asked readers who should be the People's Choice Player of the Year and placed two nominees on the ballot, one from Hewitt-Trussville and one from Orange Beach. Both are Alabama places the ballot itself names, Hewitt-Trussville and Orange Beach.

The table below gathers the fixed facts about the program in one place.

Everything else a supporter might want, from the exact open and close dates to any rule about repeat voting, appears on the live ballot rather than in a standing rulebook, so the poll.fm page is the reference to check before relying on anything here.

The dated timeline for this Alabama player of the year vote

Confirmed editions of the People People's Choice Player of the Year ran in 2023 and 2026, and those two years are what qualify the program as annual. The 2026 ballot ran under the title "Who is the 2026 People's Choice Player of the Year?" and now displays as closed, so the most recent confirmed vote has finished its run.

The voting window falls in June. The exact open and close dates inside that month, and any nomination round before voting, appear nowhere on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

When the 2026 poll closed, the result stood at 70 percent for the Hewitt-Trussville nominee against 30 percent for the Orange Beach nominee, a decisive margin on a two-name ballot.

Several details are simply absent from what the organizer publishes. There is no category list beyond the single player of the year question, no per-supporter vote limit, no eligibility text describing who may be nominated, and no printed dates for any platform round. A supporter who needs any of those details has to read them off the live ballot when the next edition opens, because no standing rules page for the award exists.

One further point on recurrence: the gap between the 2023 and 2026 edition years is wider than a strict annual run would suggest, so the June window is the most reliable scheduling fact the published years support, and the 2027 edition is an expectation rather than a printed date.

How a supporter votes in the People People's Choice Player of the Year

Voting in the People People's Choice Player of the Year is a short sequence. A supporter opens the ballot at https://poll.fm/17159002, reads the single question asking who should be the People's Choice Player of the Year, and selects the nominee they want. The 2026 edition presented a two-way choice between a Hewitt-Trussville nominee and an Orange Beach nominee, so there was no long list to work through and no separate category sections to navigate.

After selecting, the supporter presses the button at the foot of the ballot to log the choice. Once a poll closes, as the 2026 edition has, the page stops accepting selections and instead displays the final percentage split, which is how the 70 to 30 result became visible.

Two practical points follow from the format. First, because this is one award decided in one June window, a supporter has a narrow stretch of days in which the ballot actually accepts selections, unlike the weekly Alabama ballots where a new question opens every cycle. Second, the ballot prints no instruction about returning on additional days, so a supporter hoping to vote more than once has no published rule to rely on either way.

The same address carries each edition, so checking the poll.fm page in June is the way to see whether a new ballot is live and who appears on it.

How this award sits beside Alabama's weekly player ballots

The People People's Choice Player of the Year is the only annual, single-question award in its immediate group. The neighbouring programs are all weekly series: the Alabama High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Alabama High School Football Player of the Week, and the Alabama High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week. Each of those opens a fresh ballot on a rolling basis through its season, while this award concentrates everything into one June vote.

Two seasonal awards sit in the same group and are closer in shape to this one. The Alabama High School Football Player of the Year and the Alabama High School Boys Basketball Player of the Year are both end-of-season awards decided by fan vote, but each is tied to a single sport, whereas the People People's Choice Player of the Year puts nominees on one ballot without a printed sport restriction.

The practical difference for a supporter is timing and concentration. A weekly ballot gives a nominee's community a new chance every seven days, so a slow start can be recovered. This award offers one window in June, so support has to be organized before the ballot opens and delivered while it is live. The result is that the 2026 edition closed with a wide 70 to 30 margin, the kind of split a concentrated, well-organized base produces on a short ballot.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Because the People People's Choice Player of the Year compresses its whole vote into a single June window, the useful work happens before and during that stretch rather than after it. A nominee's base in Trussville, Orange Beach or anywhere else in Alabama does best when the poll.fm link is circulated with a clear ask, when supporters are told the window is short, and when the community is reminded while the ballot is still accepting selections.

The organizer prints no statement about outside help for this award, so there is no published rule either permitting or banning coordinated pushes, and no printed per-supporter cap to plan around. That silence cuts both ways: nothing restricts a community campaign, and nothing guarantees that votes arriving in unusual patterns will be counted. The safest reading is that the live ballot and its platform behaviour are the only enforcement a supporter will ever see.

For tactics that fit a short, single-question ballot of this kind, the votes guide covers outreach that works within a narrow window, and award vote support describes the paid route in general terms. Both start from the same premise: on a two-name June ballot, every day the poll is open is a day that matters.