The Record Preseason Football Player of the Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

A preseason player of the year vote, not another weekly honor

The Record Preseason Football Player of the Year Poll asks readers to pick the top high school football player before the season begins. It is run by The Record, a California newspaper whose sports desk publishes at recordnet.com, and the ballot lives at poll.fm, the Crowdsignal address the publisher uses for its fan votes, with the live vote for the current cycle at https://poll.fm/15911616. The vertical is high school sport, and any reader who opens the ballot can back a nominee, with no entry form beyond the choice itself.

What separates this ballot from its neighbours is timing and shape. Most of the publisher's sibling programs listed on this site, including the weekly football player vote that runs all fall, repeat through a season and crown a new honoree every few days. This poll compresses the question into a single preseason decision: which player deserves the year's headline before Week 1. The nominee list is assembled by The Record in advance, and supporters choose among them until the poll closes.

The table below collects the identifying facts a reader needs.

The dated record for The Record's preseason poll

Edition years confirmed for this poll are 2023 and 2025, and the recurrence pattern marks it as an annual program with a next expected run in 2026. The 2025 ballot ran in August, which fits a preseason format: the vote wraps up before or just as the regular season starts.

The 2026 cycle has a printed close. The publisher's own story on the preseason vote gives the deadline as 11:59 p.m. on Sept. 18, just as Week 3 games wrap up. That puts the cutoff in mid-September, after the opening weeks of fall football. A companion preseason piece on The Record's sports desk, covering the defensive side of the same project, states: "The Record and Martin Dentistry have selected 30 players for the Preseason Defensive Player of the Year poll," which shows the publisher builds a fixed nominee list in advance and pairs the project with a local sponsor.

Not everything is printed. The publisher has not printed the exact day this preseason ballot opens or the length of its nomination window; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The Record has printed no category list for this poll either, since the ballot asks one player of the year question rather than running a multi-category form. Because the program is annual, a supporter looking for the next edition should watch the publisher's high school football coverage in late summer.

How a supporter votes on the preseason ballot

Voting is deliberately simple. The poll.fm ballot presents the nominee list as buttons, each labelled with the player's position, class year and school. A supporter selects a nominee and taps the vote button, and the page displays the running percentage and vote total for each entry. In the 2025 edition the leading nominee, a senior from Lathrop, finished at 25 percent with 38,855 votes, and the field included seniors from Bear Creek and Chavez among other campuses, a tally that shows how heavily a well-organized fan base can outweigh the rest of the list.

The Record's rule on voting for this preseason ballot is unusually open. Its own story says: "There are no voting restrictions, so vote now and vote often." The publisher prints no ceiling on repeat votes, and no eligibility rule about who may cast one appears on the page either. Nothing in the publisher's coverage requires an account, a login or a daily return; anyone wanting another vote simply revisits the same link.

Because this is a plain open vote, the practical weight sits with reach rather than technique. A nominee whose school community passes the poll.fm link around widely, and keeps sharing it until the poll closes in mid-September, collects far more support than a nominee who waits until the final days.

Where this ballot sits among its California siblings

This poll sits inside a family of California high school sport votes with pages on this site. Its closest relative is the football player of the week series, which shares the sport but runs on a weekly cadence across the fall. The other siblings move to different seasons and sports: the baseball player of the week vote, the boys basketball weekly ballot, the girls basketball athlete of the week vote and the softball player of the week series.

The Fresno Bee's weekly athlete vote is the odd neighbour: it belongs to a different publisher in a different California market, so its ballot answers to the Fresno Bee rather than to The Record. A reader who lands on it while looking for the preseason football poll is on the wrong publisher's page.

Within that family, this program stands apart on three points. It is football only, it is preseason rather than in-season, and it crowns a yearly player rather than a weekly honoree. Those differences matter for supporters: the nominee list is fixed in advance by The Record, the window is short, and the whole year's question is settled before the season's third week ends.

Building support in this preseason poll

Support in this poll is built on repetition and reach. The Record's own rule, that there are no voting restrictions, means a supporter can return to the poll.fm ballot as often as they like, so the campaigns that win are the ones that keep their community coming back. Pass the ballot link to teammates, classmates, family groups and school social accounts early, and remind people in the days before the mid-September close. The publisher's coverage of the poll says nothing about outside help, so the safest ground is the publisher's own invitation to vote often. For a broader look at outreach methods that work on public ballots, see how to get more votes online, and for award-style ballots generally, buy award votes explains the category.