The Record Preseason Player of the Year Poll for Boys Basketball: How Voting Works & How to Win

What The Record's preseason boys basketball vote is and who runs it

The Record, a California newspaper publishing at recordnet.com, invites its readers to pick a preseason favorite in boys basketball before the season's first game. The sports desk compiles a short list of varsity nominees and hands the choice to the audience: anyone who loads the ballot can mark a player and submit, with no entry form and no judging panel between the reader and the count.

The voting runs on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm service carries the newspaper's reader ballots. The 2025-26 ballot lives at https://poll.fm/16424637, and every option names a varsity player with his position and school, in the format the sports desk uses across its preseason basketball coverage.

The poll belongs to the newspaper's own high school sports franchise rather than to an outside sponsor. That matters for supporters, because the rules, the window and the promotion all come from a single newsroom. The table below sets out the fixed facts about this preseason program.

The dated facts: which seasons ran and when the vote closed

Two seasons are on the books for this program: 2023 and 2025. The 2025 edition is the 2025-26 preseason ballot, carrying the newspaper's name and the 2025-26 season in its title on poll.fm. The two-year spread is what marks the program as a recurring feature of the paper's coverage rather than a one-off experiment.

The one dated fact the sports desk states plainly concerns the close of the 2025-26 vote: balloting remained open until 11:59 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 23. That close date anchors the whole window, because the newspaper did not print the day the poll opened, and it did not print a separate nomination round before voting began.

Other details are simply absent from the paper's published material for this poll. The Record has not printed a roster of ballot categories, since the preseason vote asks one player-of-the-year question about the coming season rather than running a multi-category ballot. The paper has also not printed the exact opening day of the vote or any nomination dates; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the confirmed seasons support is this: a preseason boys basketball poll in 2023, another in 2025, and a stated close of 11:59 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23 for the most recent edition.

How a supporter casts a vote in this preseason poll

The mechanic is deliberately simple, because the sports desk wants maximum participation from a high school readership. A supporter opens The Record's poll.fm page, reads the list of nominated players, marks one choice, and submits. No nomination form, no essay and no registration stand between the reader and the count.

The newspaper's guidance on frequency is unusually generous. Coverage of the 2025-26 poll told readers: "You may vote as many times as you'd like through the duration of the poll, so vote now and vote often." That instruction, printed by The Record alongside the ballot, is the clearest statement of the poll's design: it is built for repeat visits, not for a single vote per person.

The sports desk has published no eligibility restriction on who may take part, and no residency or age condition appears in its preseason coverage. A supporter does not need to be a subscriber to vote, as far as the printed guidance goes.

For the 2025-26 edition, the practical sequence ended on Jan. 23, when the poll closed. A supporter arriving at that page now sees the closed ballot and its options rather than a live vote. The same sequence, open page, mark, submit, return as often as desired, is what the newspaper will run again when the next preseason poll appears.

Where this preseason ballot sits among California's reader votes

The Record's preseason vote belongs to a wider family of California high school public ballots. The same market carries weekly player-of-the-week ballots across the sports calendar: a California high school baseball player of the week vote, a boys basketball player of the week ballot, a football player of the week vote, a girls basketball athlete of the week vote, and a softball player of the week vote.

Those weekly ballots and this preseason poll differ in rhythm. A player-of-the-week vote resets every seven days through a season, while the preseason poll runs once, before the games, and asks a forward-looking question: which player will own the coming months. The Fresno Bee runs the same weekly pattern with its athlete of the week program at another California newspaper.

What sets The Record's preseason ballot apart is its timing and its stakes. It is the one ballot of the group that opens before any games are played, and it crowns a season-long expectation rather than a single week's performance. All of these programs share the same underlying shape, a public vote on a polling platform promoted through the publisher's own sports coverage, which is why supporters of one ballot usually recognise the others immediately.

Rallying support in this preseason poll the way it was designed for

The poll's own rules make campaigning straightforward. Because The Record invites repeat voting, a supporter group can organise daily returns to the ballot across the whole window instead of a single late push. The newspaper's phrase, vote now and vote often, is the design brief: steady, repeated participation from the school community is exactly what this preseason ballot measures.

The practical playbook follows from that. Share the poll.fm link through team group chats and school accounts early, while attention is scarce ahead of the season. Remind supporters that each person can return and vote again, which multiplies a small base of committed families. Keep the push tied to the player's real season story, since the newspaper's readership follows the sport. General tactics that travel across public polls are gathered in our votes guide.

One caution belongs here. The sports desk has printed no rule about automated voting for this poll, and a public ballot that suddenly shows irregular patterns can draw scrutiny from the organizer. Support that grows out of the school community, repeated honestly, is the pattern this preseason vote was built around.