The Gadsden Times Midseason Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the midseason player of the year poll is and who runs it

This reader award from The Gadsden Times, the daily newspaper serving Gadsden in northeast Alabama, asks the public, not a panel of sportswriters, to pick the standout high school football player from the first half of the season. It sits inside the paper's sports coverage. The form is carried by Crowdsignal, at the poll.fm address https://poll.fm/16092992.

The programme is a single award rather than a multi-category contest. There are no divisions to enter and no separate form for the award itself; the poll presents a list of nominees and one question. When the 2025 round opened, the newspaper's own promotion described it as a vote with 38 nominees, which gives a sense of the field's size, drawn from schools across the coverage area. Named players on past rounds came from towns including Boaz, Jacksonville, Geraldine, Sand Rock, Spring Garden, Susan Moore and Coosa Christian.

Facts at a glance

Because the award celebrates high school athletes, this reference names schools and towns only, never individual players, coaches or students. The form itself carries the full nominee list each season.

The dated history: editions, windows and what the newspaper leaves unpublished

The confirmed run covers three seasons. Rounds of The Gadsden Times Midseason Football Player of the Year ran in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and each of those forms fell in September, matching the midseason point of an Alabama high school football schedule. The newspaper has not stated which year the programme first began before that run, so the 2023 round is the earliest edition the paper's own pages support.

The clearest dated fact belongs to the 2025 edition. That round's poll accepted votes through Monday, Oct. 6 at noon CT, a deadline the newspaper printed in the story sending readers to the form. The open date sat in late September, which means supporters had well under two weeks to rally behind a player. Once the deadline passed, poll.fm flipped the form to a closed state, and it stays visible at the same address.

Two things the newspaper has not put in print shape expectations for 2026. The nominee roster for the next edition does not exist yet, since a midseason award can only be nominated once the season is underway. And the paper has published no rulebook for the vote, no category structure beyond the single award, no published cap on repeat voting and no eligibility wording either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

For planning purposes, treat September as the month to watch. If the pattern from 2024 and 2025 holds, the 2026 form should appear on poll.fm near the end of that month with a noon Central close roughly a week later, but only the newspaper's announcement settles it.

How a supporter votes in the Gadsden Times midseason poll today

The act of voting is deliberately simple. A supporter opens the form The Gadsden Times hosts through Crowdsignal at poll.fm/16092992, reviews the list of players and their schools, selects one name and submits the choice. After the choice is in, poll.fm shows the running count, so the standings stay visible to everyone following the race. No purchase, code or registration is part of the form as it has been presented, and the newspaper's promotion frames it as an open invitation to readers.

Timing is the part that trips people up. Because this is a midseason award, the poll exists for a short slice of the football calendar. The 2025 form went up in late September and shut at noon Central time on Monday, Oct. 6. Outside that stretch the address shows the most recent round marked closed, which is why a supporter arriving in, say, February sees a finished poll rather than a live one. The 2026 form will appear at a fresh poll.fm address once the newspaper publishes it.

What the form does not spell out is the repeat-visit rule. Some public polls let a reader return daily, others accept a single vote per visitor, and poll.fm applies whatever configuration the organizer chose. The Gadsden Times has not printed which applies here, so the honest instruction is to follow whatever the live page states when the next edition opens, and to treat the newspaper's own story about the poll as the rulebook for that season.

How this ballot sits beside the other Alabama high school awards

The midseason player of the year is one strand in a wider family of reader votes around Alabama high school sports. Its closest neighbour is the Alabama High School Football Player of the Year, a season-long award decided at the end of the schedule, and the Alabama High School Football Player of the Week, which repeats through the fall. The midseason poll occupies the gap between them, landing at the halfway mark when a strong first half deserves recognition but a full-season resume does not exist yet.

Ballot sports branch out from there. Readers who follow other seasons can find the baseball player of the week, the boys basketball player of the week, the boys basketball player of the year and the girls basketball player of the week. Each is a separate programme, run by its own organizer and tracked on its own page, so support earned on one form does not carry to another.

What distinguishes the Gadsden midseason poll within that set is its publisher and its shape. It belongs to The Gadsden Times rather than a statewide organizer, its field is a 38-name nominee list rather than a rotating weekly shortlist, and its window is a single short September stretch rather than a season-long series. A supporter planning a push therefore gets a compressed, high-intensity race, where early organization among a school community matters more than the slow accumulation a weekly vote rewards.

Strengthening support for a midseason nominee in this poll

A short form rewards preparation. Because the midseason window ran from late September to a Monday, Oct. 6 noon close in 2025, a school community that waits for the poll to appear has already lost most of its runway. The practical move happens before the nominee list exists: identify the player's supporters, agree on the plan, and be ready to share the form link the day The Gadsden Times posts it.

For this award the paper has said nothing in print about outside help, paid support or vote services, which leaves no organizer wording to quote here either way. That silence cuts both ways. It means no published cap protects a lead, and it also means a supporter cannot point to a written allowance when deciding how far to push. The general reading on whether buying votes is legal applies: the question is the organizer's tolerance, not the statute book, and a high school honor judged by a local readership is the kind of award where visible grassroots effort tends to carry more goodwill than a sudden spike.

Ground the effort in the form's own shape. With 38 nominees splitting the vote, a well-organized single-school base can dominate the tally, and the running count on poll.fm shows instantly whether the push is working. Whatever method a supporter chooses, the place to read the newspaper's current terms is the live form for the 2026 edition.