Daily Press Fan's Choice Preseason Boys Soccer Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Daily Press preseason soccer vote is, and who runs it

Start with the contrast, because it is the fastest way to place this ballot. Most high school programs on this site are weekly honours that reset every seven days. The Daily Press Fan's Choice Preseason Boys Soccer Player of the Year does not work that way. It is a single preseason award, run by the Daily Press, the California newspaper publishing at vvdailypress.com, and it asks readers to name a boys soccer honoree ahead of the season's first kickoff.

The organizer is a newspaper, not a school district or a league. The Daily Press serves the High Desert communities of California, and its Fan's Choice soccer ballot draws nominees from schools across that coverage area. The voting itself is hosted at Crowdsignal (poll.fm), a ballot platform separate from the newspaper's own site, and the 2024 edition of the soccer vote sits at https://poll.fm/14798911.

Voting works as an open reader ballot. A supporter opens the form, sees a list of preseason boys soccer nominees paired with their schools, and selects a choice. Schools named on the 2024 form include Granite Hills, University Prep, CIMS, Barstow, Adelanto and Silver Valley, which gives a sense of the geographic spread the newspaper invites.

Facts at a glance

The dated facts behind the preseason soccer ballot

The soccer ballot ran in 2023 and came back in 2024, and those are the two edition years on its history. That is enough to treat the program as a recurring fixture in the Daily Press calendar rather than a one-off experiment, and it separates the soccer ballot from publisher polls that appear for a single season and vanish.

The voting window falls in December. The 2024 edition carried a title marking the poll as closed, and the closing details were published plainly: midnight on January 7, 2025 ended the poll, and the winner announcement was set for January 10 at vvdailypress.com. Those two dates are the most precise timing the organizer has put out for this soccer ballot.

The scale is published too. The Daily Press reported gathering more than 245,000 votes as it invited readers to choose their preferred players, and the 2024 soccer ballot itself drew 139,848 votes, with the winning nominee, from Barstow, taking 53 percent of the total. Those figures show a poll with real reach across the High Desert rather than a token turnout.

Several facts sit outside that list. The newspaper has not printed the exact opening day of the soccer window, a nominee roster for the next edition, a per-reader vote limit, or the year the next preseason ballot will run; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher's sports section at vvdailypress.com is where any of those details will appear first.

Casting a vote on the poll.fm soccer ballot

Casting a vote takes three moves. The supporter opens the current Daily Press preseason boys soccer ballot at poll.fm, looks over the nominees, selects the player the vote should count for, and submits. The 2024 form paired each nominee with a school, so a supporter from Barstow, Adelanto, Apple Valley, Hesperia or Lucerne Valley could find a player from a nearby program without scrolling a long list.

One caution applies today: the 2024 edition at https://poll.fm/14798911 is marked closed, so a selection submitted there now goes nowhere. The live address for the next soccer edition will be a new poll.fm link, and the Daily Press has not said where that link will sit or when it will open. Watching the sports section at vvdailypress.com in December is the practical way to catch it.

Two rules are absent from the soccer ballot page. Whether a reader may come back on a later day and cast another vote is not stated, and whether any sign-in is required before the submit button works is not stated either. The form itself settles both questions in the moment: if a login step exists, it appears before a choice can be counted, and if a second visit is accepted, the form simply takes it.

Because the ballot involves no nomination round for the supporter to perform, the whole task is a visit, a selection and a submit. That simplicity is why the soccer poll travels well by link among school communities.

Where this ballot sits among its California neighbours

The sibling programs listed for California are all weekly awards: the California High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week, the Softball Player of the Week, and the football ballot at the football page. Each of those resets on a weekly rhythm and names a new honoree again and again through a season.

This Daily Press soccer ballot answers a different question. It runs once per cycle, in December, before the boys soccer season starts, and it names a single season-long honoree instead of a rotating weekly pick. A supporter who misses the December window waits for the next edition instead of catching the following week's ballot, which changes how support has to be organised.

The publisher differs from some siblings too. The Fresno Bee Athlete of the Week answers to the Fresno Bee, a different California newspaper, while this soccer award answers to the Daily Press at vvdailypress.com. The two papers do not share a ballot, a nominee list or a winner announcement, so support built for one paper's poll does nothing for the other's.

What makes this ballot distinctive in the market is the combination: a preseason timing slot none of the weekly programs occupy, a boys soccer focus none of them cover, and a High Desert nominee pool drawn from schools such as Granite Hills, University Prep, CIMS, Barstow, Adelanto and Silver Valley.

Strengthening support for a Daily Press soccer nominee

Support for this ballot has to move fast, because the December window gives a preseason soccer nominee a short run rather than a season-long weekly cycle. The format rewards reach: every supporter who opens the poll.fm link and selects the nominee counts, so the practical work is putting that link in front of school communities in Barstow, Adelanto, Apple Valley, Hesperia and Lucerne Valley while the ballot is live.

The Daily Press prints no guidance on outside help for the soccer poll, so no organiser statement on purchased votes exists to point to. What a supporter can count on is the ballot's own shape: an open reader ballot where each submitted selection adds to the total reported at vvdailypress.com.

For a fuller picture of what strengthens a nominee in a newspaper reader poll, see the more-votes guide, and for the service options available for a public ballot like this one, the votes service page lists them without promising any result.