Who is the Record Searchlight girls basketball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Record Searchlight player of the year vote is

This player of the year ballot for high school girls basketball is a public-vote award run by the Record Searchlight, the daily newspaper whose sports desk covers high school athletics in its California coverage area. The ballot asks exactly one question, which nominee is the Record Searchlight's pick for girls basketball player of the year. Crowdsignal, at poll.fm, is the polling platform that carries many newspaper fan votes and hosts this one. The voting address is https://poll.fm/16708849, and after the 2026 window the page carried a Poll Closed label.

The nominees on the 2026 ballot are high school players from schools the ballot names as Enterprise, Foothill, West Valley and Redding Christian. Each option pairs a class year, junior or senior, with the player's school, so a supporter can see at a glance which programme each candidate represents. Because every nominee is a minor, this page describes the ballot by school and class and leaves the names to the poll itself.

The vertical is sport and the contest type is an award decided entirely by public vote. There is no nomination round printed on this ballot; the publisher's sports desk selected the nominee list and opened the poll to readers. The Record Searchlight promoted the vote through its own coverage, which is where the window dates were announced.

The dated facts behind this award

Two editions of this player-of-the-year vote are confirmed: 2022 and 2026. That spread is what qualifies the programme as annual instead of a single poll, though the publisher has not printed a year-by-year list filling the gap between those editions. The 2026 edition carries the fully dated window.

The 2026 voting window ran from March 16 through March 23, 2026. The Record Searchlight's own story announcing the poll set the close at noon on Monday, March 23, so supporters had a week to cast a vote. The ballot now reads Poll Closed, and the standings at close, including the leading total shown on the page, remain visible at the poll.fm address.

The ballot prints no category roster beyond the single player-of-the-year question, and no per-supporter voting rule or eligibility text accompanies it; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher has also not announced when a 2027 edition would begin. Given that the 2026 window landed in March, right after the high school basketball season, a similar placement would be the pattern to expect, but the date itself is the publisher's to announce.

For anyone tracking this programme, the two things worth watching are the publisher's sports coverage at the end of the basketball season and the poll.fm page itself, which carries the authoritative window once the poll is live.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

The mechanic on this Crowdsignal ballot is a plain public poll. A supporter opens the Record Searchlight ballot, reads the single question, picks the option next to one nominated player, then presses the vote button under the list. Crowdsignal registers the choice at once and the page refreshes to show the standing. No login step is printed on the ballot, and there is no write-in box; the choice is limited to the publisher's nominee list.

Each option carries a class year and a school, Enterprise, Foothill, West Valley or Redding Christian, which is the quickest check that a vote has landed on the intended candidate before the button is pressed. Because the poll is a single-question ballot rather than a multi-category form, the whole process takes under a minute.

Right now the practical answer for a supporter is that the 2026 poll is closed. The page accepts no new votes, so the sequence above applies to the next edition rather than the current one. When the Record Searchlight opens a new player-of-the-year poll, the fresh poll.fm address will replace the closed one, and the same select-and-submit mechanic will apply. Anyone planning a coordinated push for a nominee should read the window dates first, since votes cast outside the open window do nothing for a candidate.

Where this ballot sits among its neighbours

This award is the year-end bookend to a family of weekly fan votes in the same state. Its closest sibling is the California High School Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week, which runs during the season rather than after it. The same publisher-family pattern produces the California High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the California High School Baseball Player of the Week.

Two further weekly programmes cover other sports: the California High School Football Player of the Week and the California High School Softball Player of the Week. A separate publisher appears in the sibling set as well, the Fresno Bee Athlete of the Week, which shows that California's newspaper fan votes are not a single publisher's operation.

What makes this ballot different from those neighbours is its scope and timing. The weekly votes rotate nominees during a season, while this one asks a single year-end question about girls basketball and lands in March, after the high school season concludes. It is also narrower geographically: the nominees come from schools in the Record Searchlight's own coverage area, Enterprise, Foothill, West Valley and Redding Christian among them, rather than from a statewide pool. Anyone weighing where to focus should treat the two as different programmes with different windows, not as one continuous vote.

Strengthening support in this player-of-the-year vote

Support in this programme is built on the ballot's own mechanic: a single selection, submitted at the poll.fm address, during a window that in 2026 lasted from March 16 to March 23. That short window is the defining constraint. A push that starts after the close at noon on the final Monday does nothing, so the school community needs the link and the deadline before the first day, not after it.

The Record Searchlight has published no rules text for this ballot about outside assistance, vote software or repeat voting, so the organiser's position on purchased votes is not published for this award. What is on the page is the poll's structure: one question, one nominee list drawn from Enterprise, Foothill, West Valley and Redding Christian, and a Crowdsignal host that registers each selection as it is submitted. Outreach that asks real supporters to vote, share the link and remind teammates fits that structure. For a fuller treatment of the tactics that suit a short-window newspaper poll, see our votes guide, and for award-style ballots generally, the award votes page covers the category.