Vote for the Gadsden Times Preseason Boys Soccer Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why this Gadsden soccer poll matters

Every preseason, The Gadsden Times hands part of its soccer coverage over to readers through a fan poll. The newspaper, based in Gadsden, Alabama, covers high school athletics across northeast Alabama, and this ballot asks the same audience that reads its soccer reporting to decide which preseason nominee deserves the fan title. It is a readership award, run under the newspaper's own masthead, not an Alabama high school athletic association designation.

The community that votes is broad. The nominee list stretches across the region's soccer programs, with players identified by schools in Boaz, Albertville, Collinsville, Hokes Bluff, Southside and Gadsden itself. That footprint matters for supporters, because a nominee's vote total tends to track how well a school community rallies. A 5A program in Boaz and a city program in Gadsden are competing for the same readership, and the publisher counts every daily vote the same way regardless of school size.

The ballot itself lives on Crowdsignal at poll.fm, the polling host behind the newspaper's interactive coverage. The current voting link is poll.fm/16627939. For a supporter, the practical meaning is simple: the poll is a plain public vote, open to anyone the link reaches, and the publisher's article framed it as a fan choice honor for the region. The table below gathers the fixed facts about the program.

Which editions are confirmed, and when the window closes

Three editions of this fan vote are confirmed: 2023, 2025 and 2026. The 2023 evidence comes from the newspaper's own program notes, while the 2025 and 2026 editions are anchored by dated ballots on the poll.fm host. That three-year spread is why the program reads as an annual fixture in The Gadsden Times' sports calendar rather than a one-off experiment, and the 2026 edition is the most recent one with a ballot that supporters can still see.

The firmest date attached to the current cycle comes from the publisher's own story: voting would close on Wednesday, June 10 at noon CT. That single sentence does double duty, because it fixes the end of the 2026 window and, in the same breath, states the per-supporter rule that participants could vote once each day. The month of June therefore marks the close of the most recent cycle, which fits a preseason award published ahead of the following soccer season.

The timeline also has honest gaps. The ballot itself carries no opening date for the 2026 window, and no nomination-round dates are attached to the poll page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Neither does the ballot carry a rules section covering eligibility or how ties are handled. Supporters planning around a future edition should anchor on the newspaper's June coverage pattern, which is where the closing announcement appeared, and treat the live poll page as the only source for whether voting is open at any given moment.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The mechanic is as plain as fan votes get. A supporter opens the Crowdsignal page, scans the nominee list, and selects a player. Every option names a nominee and the northeast Alabama school behind them, so the choice is made on familiar terms: a Boaz backer picks the Boaz nominee, an Albertville family picks theirs. No account, no fee and no registration stand between a reader and the submit button, which is the reason publisher polls on this host tend to spread quickly through school communities.

The frequency rule is what shapes a real campaign. The publisher's article states participants could vote once each day, so the supporters who matter are the ones who return. A daily vote sustained across the full window is worth many times a single session, and the difference between the leading nominees in a field of 33 contenders is usually built by schools that turn the daily return into a habit, in group chats, team pages and morning announcements, rather than by any last-day push.

Timing awareness completes the picture. The most recent window closed on Wednesday, June 10 at noon CT, so a supporter who discovers the ballot late in the period has less runway than the date suggests. The poll page itself switches to a closed status once voting ends, which is the clearest signal available. Everything a supporter needs for the current cycle, the nominee field, the school pairings and the open or closed status, sits on the single ballot page the newspaper links from its soccer coverage.

How this ballot sits beside its Alabama neighbours

The Gadsden Times' soccer vote is one entry in a wider Alabama fan-vote scene, and knowing its neighbours helps a supporter understand what makes it distinct. Our directory carries several statewide high school programs in the same vertical, each with its own publisher and rhythm: 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.

Three things set the soccer ballot apart from those programmes. First, it is a player of the year honor rather than a weekly series, so a supporter gets one window and one cumulative result instead of a fresh ballot every few days. Second, it is anchored to a single local publisher, The Gadsden Times, and its northeast Alabama coverage area, where several of the statewide programmes address Alabama as a whole. Third, the nominee list is tied to specific town schools, Boaz, Albertville, Collinsville, Hokes Bluff and Southside among them, which gives the vote a community identity that a statewide ballot cannot match.

For a nominee's supporters, that local character is an advantage. The same readership the newspaper serves every day is the voting population, so coverage in the paper itself carries directly into the poll. A supporter following several of these Alabama programmes at once should keep their calendars separate, because a weekly player of the week vote resets constantly while this soccer honor runs as one continuous race toward its published close.