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

What the Record Searchlight's player of the year vote is and who runs it

The Record Searchlight is the daily newspaper for the Redding area of California, publishing at redding.com, and at the end of each boys basketball season it hands its readers a year-end question: who deserves to be called player of the year. The answer is decided by a public fan vote rather than by a writers' panel, so the direction of the award comes straight from the community that followed the season.

The balloting runs through Crowdsignal, the polling service reached via poll.fm. The 2026 ballot lives at poll.fm/16730128, and the page carries a single question with a nominee list attached. Nineteen players from Redding area schools were nominated for the title, a mix of seniors and juniors whose names appear on the ballot with a class tag and a school beside each one.

Because the vote is hosted on a third-party polling service, the ballot looks and behaves like a standard poll.fm page: a question, a list of options, a submit control and a running tally. The Record Searchlight supplies the nominees, the framing and the printed rules; Crowdsignal supplies the machinery. That split matters to a supporter, because the rules in the newspaper's sports story, not any platform default, are the ones that govern this award.

The dated record for the boys basketball player of the year ballot

The program's confirmed editions run in 2022 and 2026, and the recurrence is annual, with 2027 the expected year for the next edition. The 2026 cycle is the one with a printed window: voting ran from March 16 through March 23, and the newspaper set the deadline in plain terms in its own story. "Voting is limited to one submission per hour and will close at noon on Monday, March 23." That sentence fixes both the pace of the vote and the moment it ended.

The nominee field for that cycle held nineteen players drawn from Redding area high schools, put forward by the paper as the most outstanding boys basketball players of the season. The ballot page now shows the vote in a closed state, with percentages and tallies frozen beside each name, so the 2026 result has been decided even though the platform keeps the page standing for readers who arrive late.

What the ballot does not carry is any breakdown into further categories; the player of the year question stands alone on the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Record Searchlight's basketball ballot

The mechanic stays deliberately plain. A supporter opens the Crowdsignal page at poll.fm/16730128, reads down the list of nominated players, selects the radio button beside one name and submits the form. No essay, no photo upload and no nomination step sits in front of the vote; the Record Searchlight has already narrowed the field to nineteen players before the ballot ever opens.

The pace comes from the newspaper's rule rather than from the platform. One submission per hour is the printed limit, which means a determined household can return again and again across the eight-day window, while a casual reader can vote once and still be counted. The deadline in the 2026 edition was noon on Monday, March 23, after which the poll closed and the tally froze.

For the next cycle, due in 2027, the same shape applies: the Record Searchlight publishes a sports story with the nominee list and a fresh poll.fm link, the window runs for about a week in March, and the hourly cap governs how often a submission counts. Anyone arriving at the 2026 address today will find a closed poll, so the live link for a new edition has to come from the newspaper's current coverage.

How this award sits beside its California sibling polls

The Record Searchlight's year-end ballot is one of several public votes in the California high school sports family on this site. The weekly siblings cover the in-season rhythm: the California High School Baseball Player of the Week, the California High School Football Player of the Week, the California High School Girls Basketball Athlete of the Week and the California High School Softball Player of the Week.

The closest neighbour is the California High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week, which honors a single game or a single week during the season. The Record Searchlight's ballot answers a different question: after the schedule is done, which player across the whole Redding area season deserves the year-end title. One resets every seven days; the other crowns once and then closes.

Outside the state-wide weekly set, the Fresno Bee Athlete of the Week shows the same publisher-run pattern in a different market, a newspaper putting its readers in charge of an honor. What makes the Record Searchlight's program distinct within that group is the combination of a year-end scope, a Redding area nominee field and an hourly submission cap printed in the organizer's own story.

Strengthening support for a player of the year nominee

Support in this program is a scheduling problem before anything else. The Record Searchlight allows one submission per hour, so a nominee's backers do best when returns are spread across the full March 16 to March 23 window instead of piled into a single evening. A school community that assigns the link to team families, sets reminders around the hourly turnover and keeps the poll.fm address circulating in group chats will outwork a last-day push under these rules.

The organizer's own wording is the boundary line: the newspaper prints the hourly cap in its story and closes the ballot at a stated noon deadline, and anything that ignores those terms puts a nominee's standing at risk. For readers weighing outside help, the honest starting points are this page's votes overview and the award votes page, which describe the general service without promising any result. No outcome in a newspaper-run fan vote is guaranteed, and the tally on the Crowdsignal page is the only verdict that counts.