The RS Midseason Defensive Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the RS Midseason Defensive Player of the Year is and who runs it

RS publishes the Midseason Defensive Player of the Year as a public vote for California high school football. The ballot asks a plain question, who deserves the midseason defensive honour, and answers it with a list of defenders drawn from programs in the northern part of the state, around Redding, Anderson, Red Bluff and Shasta. The award is midseason by design, so it lands while the football schedule is still running rather than after a championship is settled.

The vote lives on Crowdsignal at poll.fm/16094173, and that address is the whole ballot: a question, a nominee list and a tally. RS is the organizer name the page carries, and the vertical is sport, specifically the defensive side of high school football. Linebackers, defensive backs, cornerbacks and defensive linemen all appear as nominees, which distinguishes this ballot from offensive player awards that dominate the category.

For a supporter, the practical picture is simple. RS supplies the ballot, Crowdsignal supplies the form and the count, and the schools around Redding supply the nominees. Everything else about structure, from judging to prizes, is absent from the page RS publishes.

The dated tally for the RS midseason defensive ballot

The Midseason Defensive Player of the Year shows confirmed runs in 2022 and 2025, which is why the programme counts as annual. The voting window in the cycle RS last ran sat inside August, with the month carrying both the opening and the closing of the ballot. The page carries no printed opening or closing date, and RS has not published those dates anywhere alongside the poll.

The 2025 edition is marked closed on Crowdsignal. Its final tally shows a defensive lineman entry from a U-Prep school leading on 4,441 votes, a 30 percent share of the count. A Red Bluff defensive lineman entry finished behind it on 2,921 votes at 20 percent. Trailing entries included a West Valley linebacker at 27 votes, a U-Prep linebacker at 23 and a Shasta linebacker at 22, a spread that shows how heavily the top of this ballot outpolled the rest of the defensive field.

Beyond the tally, RS publishes little. No category roster appears on the ballot page, no eligibility text accompanies the nominee list, and no platform round dates are posted for the market. A supporter planning for the next edition has the August month and the poll.fm address, and nothing printed about rules, prizes or a nomination round before voting.

How a supporter votes in the RS midseason defensive ballot

RS settles the midseason defensive honour with a straight Crowdsignal public vote. When the August ballot opens, a supporter goes to poll.fm/16094173, reads the defensive nominee list, marks a selection and submits the form. The count updates on the same page, so the tally is visible to everybody the moment a choice lands. No sign-in prompt appears in the voting form RS published for the 2025 edition, and no category navigation sits above the list, because the ballot covers a single defensive honour.

With a single August window and no reset, when a campaign moves matters as much as how it moves. The 2025 ballot is already marked closed, so a visit today returns results rather than a live form. A supporter who wants to move a nominee next cycle needs the poll address saved and the August month watched, because RS prints no advance schedule for the round.

Supporters who want to strengthen a campaign beyond a personal click generally combine the ballot link with outreach to the school community, since the nominees are defensive players with teammates, families and student sections behind them. The practical playbook for that kind of push is laid out on the more-votes guide, and the award-specific context for ballots like this sits on the award votes page. What the organizer permits beyond a plain vote is absent from every page RS publishes, so any campaign assumption about limits rests on the live form's behaviour rather than on published RS rules.

How the RS midseason ballot sits beside its California neighbours

The Midseason Defensive Player of the Year is unusual in its market because it honours defence at midseason, while most of its neighbours on the California ballot calendar are weekly honours. RS's own state shares a ballot family with the California High School Football Player of the Week, which repeats through the season rather than landing at the midpoint, and with the California High School Baseball Player of the Week and the California High School Softball Player of the Week in spring sports.

Basketball contributes the boys player of the week and the girls athlete of the week, and the Fresno Bee Athlete of the Week adds a newspaper-run honour from a different publisher. Against that field, the RS midseason ballot stands out for its defensive focus, its August window and its northern California school base around Redding, Anderson, Red Bluff and Shasta.

Cadence is what separates this programme from the weekly ballots around it. A weekly honour gives a campaign a fresh start every few days, while a midseason award gives a single August window and then closes, as the 2025 edition did. That makes preparation and timing worth more here than raw reach, and it explains why the poll.fm tally for this programme concentrated so heavily on its leading entries.

Strengthening support in the RS midseason defensive vote

A campaign for this ballot works the school community it comes from. The nominees are defenders at programs around Redding, Anderson, Red Bluff and Shasta, so the natural audience is teammates, families and the student section, reached with the poll.fm link while the August window is open. Because the 2025 tally concentrated on a handful of entries, early momentum in the window matters more here than in a weekly format that resets constantly.

RS publishes no rule text touching outside support anywhere on the ballot, so a campaign should assume nothing about what the organizer tolerates and should treat the live form's behaviour as the only signal. The general methods that work on public votes of this shape, from timing pushes to widening the share base, are set out on the more-votes guide, and the service context for purchased support sits on the votes page. No promise about outcomes belongs in that planning, because the organizer guarantees nothing and the ballot is a fan honour.