Vote for Gadsden Times' fan choice Tennis Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gadsden Times fan choice tennis ballot is

Behind the title Vote for Gadsden Times' fan choice Tennis Player of the Year sits a reader award from The Gadsden Times, the daily newspaper based in Gadsden, Alabama. The paper collects all-area nominations from high school tennis around Northeast Alabama, turns the leading names into a single fan-choice ballot, and lets its readership decide which nominee carries the fan title. The 2026 edition carried 27 nominees, a list the paper drew from nominations submitted around the region rather than an open entry form.

Crowdsignal, the polling service reached through the poll.fm domain, carries the ballot itself. The voting address for this program is https://poll.fm/17188458, and the page pairs each nominee with a school, among them Westbrook Christian, Sardis, Southside, Albertville and Etowah. Because every name on the list belongs to a high school athlete, this reference describes the program by publisher, sport, season and school affiliation and leaves the individual names to the ballot page.

Within the sport vertical this program is a seasonal award rather than a weekly honor: it crowns one fan choice player for the tennis season, and its confirmed editions so far are 2022 and 2026. The table below pulls together the fixed facts a reader needs.

The dated record: 2022, 2026 and what is not printed

Two edition years stand behind this program: 2022 and 2026. That pair is what qualifies the ballot as an annual fixture in the paper's sports coverage, and the distance between those two years is simply the span the published evidence covers. A further cycle is expected in 2027, but the newspaper has not yet printed its dates.

The 2026 edition is the one with a full published window. Voting opened July 3, 2026, and the organizer's announcement set the expiry precisely: the poll expires noon CT Friday, July 10. That gives the cycle a July span, which fits a spring tennis season honored once the school year has ended. The same announcement carried the daily rule, stating you can vote once a day, and the nominee count, 27 players from all-area nominations around Northeast Alabama.

When the window closed, the ballot page switched to a Poll Closed notice and displayed the final standings: the leading nominee finished at 28 percent and the runner-up at 15 percent, with the remainder spread across the rest of the 27-name list. The Gadsden Times has not yet printed the 2027 window or the nominee roster for the next tennis ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

The mechanic is the plain Crowdsignal format. A fan reaches the ballot through poll.fm, reads a list in which every option pairs a nominee with a Northeast Alabama high school, marks the choice next to one player, and presses the vote button. There is no write-in box and no login requirement on the ballot as published; the choice is made from the fixed nominee list the newspaper posted.

The one rule the organizer states is frequency: you can vote once a day. The daily return is therefore the central supporter action. A fan who wants a nominee to climb the standings comes back on a later calendar day and submits a fresh selection, and the July 2026 window allowed that pattern from July 3 until the noon CT close on Friday, July 10.

After the expiry the page stops accepting selections and shows the Poll Closed banner with the final percentages beside each option. That is the state the 17188458 ballot sits in now, so a visitor arriving today sees results rather than a live form. For the next edition the same address or a fresh poll.fm link will carry the new list, and the newspaper's sports desk announces the window when it opens.

Where this ballot sits among the Alabama high school programs

This tennis award belongs to a family of Alabama high school fan ballots covered on this site, most of them weekly honors rather than seasonal ones. The neighbours are the Alabama High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Boys Basketball Player of the Year, the Football Player of the Week, the Football Player of the Year and the Girls Basketball Player of the Week.

What separates the tennis ballot from those six is its publisher and its rhythm. The weekly programs run on a rolling schedule through their sports seasons, while this one is a single fan-choice decision published by The Gadsden Times after the tennis season ends, with a short July window and one winner. Its market is also more local: the nominee pool comes from all-area nominations around Northeast Alabama, anchored on the Gadsden readership, rather than a statewide field.

The practical difference for a fan comes down to timing. A weekly ballot offers a new chance every seven days, while this award offers one concentrated window each year, which is why the once-a-day rule and the July dates matter more here than they would on a rolling series.

Supporting a nominee within the organizer's rules

Because the ballot takes one selection per person per day, the strongest legitimate push is an organized daily habit shared across a school community. During a live window, teammates, families and classmates can each cast a daily selection and remind one another until the noon close on the final day. The 2026 standings showed how much a sustained push matters, with the leader at 28 percent and the chase at 15 percent when the poll expired.

The organizer's stated limit is the boundary: one selection per person per day, on the ballot The Gadsden Times posted. Anything that manufactures volume beyond real daily supporters conflicts with the published terms of the fan choice award. For approaches that stay inside an organizer's rules, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the award-style ballots specifically, our award votes page explains the category.