The Cunningham Bounds Coastal Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A coastal sponsor ballot apart from the statewide Alabama awards

Most player-of-the-week ballots covering Alabama high school football sit under statewide labels and pull nominees from every corner of the state. This one does not. It carries its sponsor's name directly, Cunningham Bounds Coastal, and its nominees come from schools along the coast: the Round 1 ballot paired players with Bayside Academy, Fairhope, St. Michael, Theodore, Saraland and Cottage Hill. That local branding is the clearest difference between this programme and the statewide contests beside it, including the Alabama High School Football Player of the Week.

The vote itself runs on Crowdsignal, the poll.fm service, at poll.fm/16252399. That address is the latest ballot of the weekly series, and its headline asks who should be the Round 1 Cunningham Bounds Coastal Player of the Week. The vertical is sport, voting is open to anyone who reaches the page, and the audience is the families, students and supporters of the schools whose players appear on each week's list.

Facts at a glance

What the dated facts establish about this series

The dated anchors for this programme are plain. Confirmed editions exist for 2023 and 2025, and the 2025 season unfolded as a series of weekly ballots dated between August and November. The latest ballot in the series, poll 16252399, asks the Round 1 question and is marked closed, with its results line showing a leading nominee at 35 percent. The programme is treated as annual, and 2026 is the next year a season would be expected.

Beyond those anchors, Cunningham Bounds Coastal prints little about how the series runs. No open and close dates for the individual rounds appear on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The page also carries no published schedule of future rounds, no statement of how nominees are selected week to week, and no per-supporter rule of any kind. Whether a round is open right now, and when the next round opens, can only be read off the live poll.fm page while the season is running.

How a supporter casts a vote in a live round

When a round is open, voting follows the plain Crowdsignal pattern. The supporter loads that week's poll.fm page, reads a short list of nominees shown by name beside their schools, selects the player to support, and submits the choice. Result percentages display on the page, which is how the closed Round 1 poll shows its standings.

Right now the ballot at the voting link is closed, so the practical step for a supporter is to check whether a newer round in the series has opened on the same host. The communities behind the nominees are easy to identify: the ballot draws from schools in and around Mobile, Saraland, Fairhope, Gulf Shores, Daphne and Jackson, so each weekly poll gives those towns a direct stake in the outcome. That local stake is what drives the voting each week, since a nomination puts a school's own player in front of its whole community for a few days at a time, and the weekly rhythm of the series means a new chance arrives quickly for schools whose player missed the cut in an earlier round.

Where this ballot sits among the Alabama player awards

This page belongs to a family of Alabama high school voting programmes, and the contrast with each of them clarifies what this one is. The Alabama High School Football Player of the Week and the Player of the Year ballots cover football statewide, while the boys basketball and girls basketball weekly ballots, plus the boys basketball Player of the Year and the baseball Player of the Week, cover their own sports across the whole state.

This ballot differs in three ways at the same time. Its name carries a sponsor, Cunningham Bounds Coastal, rather than a sport-wide label. Its nominees come from coastal Alabama schools rather than the entire state. And its season sits inside the football calendar, with weekly rounds dated from August through November, whereas the basketball and baseball ballots follow their own sports' calendars. A supporter deciding where to spend attention should therefore treat this poll as the football ballot for the coast specifically, not as a duplicate of the statewide football award.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Because each round is a short weekly window, the clock matters more in this series than on a season-long award. A nominee's strongest asset is his school community, and the fastest route is sharing the live poll.fm link with that community while the round is still open, through the channels the school already uses. Supporters in Fairhope, Saraland, Gulf Shores, Daphne and the other towns behind the nominees can move a tally noticeably within a weekly window.

Cunningham Bounds Coastal publishes no rules on organised support, so nothing on the ballot page either permits or forbids it. What is universal is the arithmetic of a public poll: votes arrive through people, and people arrive through reminders. Our votes guide covers the methods that work on ballots of this shape, and the award votes page sets out the broader options for awards decided by public vote.