Record Searchlight's Midseason Boys Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

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

The Record Searchlight runs a midseason honor for California high school boys basketball that readers decide by public vote. The organizer is a California newspaper covering high school sports in its market, and the ballot lives on Crowdsignal, reached through the poll.fm address. The voting URL for the program is https://poll.fm/16463710, which is the ballot page itself rather than a platform root.

The award's defining feature is its timing. Rather than waiting for the end of the season, the publisher opens the vote at midseason, with the window landing in January. That makes it a mid-course honor: it recognizes the player having the strongest season to that point, as judged by the paper's readers, while the season is still in progress.

The mechanic is a public vote. The publisher posts a ballot of nominees, each identified by position and school, and readers decide the outcome. The 2026 ballot listed guards, a center and forwards from California high school programs, and displayed a live percentage tally as votes arrived.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: editions, the January window and what is unpublished

The program's confirmed years are 2022 and 2026. The recurrence data marks it as annual, and the gap between those two years leaves the intermediate cycles undocumented, so the edition list should be read as a floor rather than a complete history.

The window lands in January. That midseason placement is the program's one fixed point on the calendar: the ballot carries no printed start or end date, no category list beyond the player award itself, and no rule on repeat voting by a supporter; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The most recent confirmed run is the 2026 edition, and its ballot is marked closed. The final standing shown on that ballot put the leading nominee at 26 percent of the vote, on a total of 16,846 votes cast for that player. Those figures come from the closed ballot's own result display, and they give a sense of scale: a winning position in this poll has required a five-figure vote count, which means the school communities behind the nominees drive the outcome.

Because the ballot carries a closed marker between editions, a supporter arriving on the poll.fm page outside the January window will see results rather than a live form. The publisher opens the next ballot on its own schedule, and the closed page is where the next edition's link will appear once it goes live.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

Voting takes place on the poll.fm ballot page. A supporter opens it, reads the nominee list, selects a choice and submits. Each nominee appears with a position and a school, so the ballot reads as a short roster of the season's standouts rather than a long form with many questions.

The page shows the running result as a percentage beside each choice. On the closed 2026 ballot, that display is how the 16,846-vote leader's 26 percent share remains visible. During a live window the same display updates as votes arrive, which is why supporters tend to watch the page through the January window rather than voting once and leaving.

Two practical points follow from the format. First, the ballot is a single question with listed options, so there is no write-in step and no separate nomination form to handle; the publisher has already chosen the roster before the window opens. Second, the ballot page shows no sign-in requirement, so a supporter does not need an account on the platform to take part, though whether repeat votes from the same person are accepted is not stated anywhere on the page.

If the page reads "Poll Closed", the window has ended and the tally is final for that edition. The literal sequence a supporter follows today is laid out in the voting steps below, and it is the same whether the ballot is live or closed; only the submit step depends on the window being open.

How this ballot sits beside its California neighbours

This award is the midseason, single-question entry in a wider set of California high school sports ballots. The closest neighbours are the publisher's weekly series: California High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week runs through the season in shorter cycles, and California High School Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week does the same for the girls game.

The seasonal sports follow the same weekly pattern: California High School Football Player of the Week in the fall, then California High School Baseball Player of the Week and California High School Softball Player of the Week in the spring. A separate publisher runs Fresno Bee Athlete of the Week, a different California newspaper with its own ballot.

What separates the midseason award from those neighbours is cadence and scope. The weekly programs reset every few days and restart the count from nothing each time, while this ballot runs a single January window for the whole midseason honor, and its winning tally reaches five figures. A supporter planning a push therefore faces a different shape here: a longer window, a larger target number, and a roster fixed by the publisher in advance rather than refreshed each week.

Strengthening support during the January window

The ballot's mechanic shapes what support looks like. Because the roster is fixed by the publisher and the window sits at midseason, the work is concentrated: share the poll.fm link directly with the school community, the booster network and local basketball families while the window is open, and point them at the specific nominee rather than at a search result. The live percentage display means progress is visible, which helps a coordinated push keep momentum through the January window.

The organizer has not published any statement on outside help for this ballot, so there is no organizer rule to quote on purchased or automated votes. What is certain is the format: a public Crowdsignal ballot, a five-figure winning tally in the most recent confirmed edition, and a closed marker between windows. Any support plan should be built around the live page's own terms. For a fuller treatment of methods that work in reader-voted polls like this, see our votes guide, and for award-specific ballots generally, buy award votes covers the wider category.