Your Pick for the Delaware Preseason Girls Volleyball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What sets this preseason volleyball vote apart from Delaware's weekly athlete polls

Most reader awards in the Delaware market reward something that already happened. The Delaware Online Football Athlete of the Week and the Delaware Online Winter Athlete of the Week both look back at a finished week of competition, and the SI series for football, boys basketball and girls basketball works the same way. This ballot runs the other direction. Your Pick for the Delaware Preseason Girls Volleyball Player of the Year asks readers to judge players before the Delaware season has produced a single match, which makes it a prediction award rather than a review one.

That preseason timing shapes everything about the vote. Delaware Online publishes the question in the July to August stretch, when rosters are set but standings do not yet exist, so the case for a nominee rests on returning talent and expectations rather than box scores. The publisher runs the vote through Crowdsignal on poll.fm, the same balloting platform that carries its weekly polls, and the ballot is a straightforward reader choice with no entry fee and no payment of any kind.

The contrast matters for supporters too. A weekly athlete poll resets every seven days, so a slow start costs little. The preseason volleyball vote runs once per season, and the two confirmed editions, 2025 and 2026, each stood as the single chance to back a player before the fall schedule began. A family that misses the window waits a full year for the next preseason ballot.

Facts at a glance

The dated history of the Delaware preseason volleyball ballot

Two editions of the preseason volleyball vote are confirmed: 2025 and 2026. Both were harvested from the Crowdsignal platform, where each edition ran as its own numbered poll under the Delaware Online name, and both carry the same preseason question about the Delaware girls volleyball player of the year. That two-year run is the entire published history of the award. No earlier edition has been documented, and the publisher's own sports pages are where a 2027 edition would first appear if the series continues.

The seasonal placement is the one timing fact the ballot history supports. Both confirmed editions fall in the July to August window, which fits the meaning of a preseason award: the vote closes before Delaware volleyball teams play their first meaningful match. Within that window, the exact open and close dates are a different matter. Delaware Online has not printed a dated start or finish for the preseason volleyball ballot on the page a supporter actually votes on, and the platform side carries no promotion listing for this market either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Other gaps sit alongside the dates. The ballot page lists no secondary categories alongside the single Delaware preseason player question, no per-supporter voting rule and no eligibility statement for the volleyball nominees. The publisher also has not stated when each preseason poll opened for nominations or whether a separate nomination round precedes the vote. None of those absences is unusual for a publisher poll of this size, but it does mean a supporter planning a push for a nominee should treat the live poll page, not any summary, as the deciding source for the current season's rules.

How a supporter casts a ballot in the Delaware preseason volleyball poll

Casting a vote in the Delaware Online volleyball question takes under a minute. The supporter follows the publisher's link from its high school sports coverage to the Crowdsignal form, reads the preseason question at the top, and scans the nominee list beneath it. Each option pairs one Delaware girls volleyball player with her school, and the list is short enough to read in a single pass. Tapping the circle beside a name selects that nominee, and the vote button at the bottom of the form submits the choice.

After submission, Crowdsignal logs the selection and the running tally for the volleyball question becomes visible, so a supporter can see where a favored player stands before the preseason window closes in August. No login, no email entry and no payment step appear on the ballot. The vote costs nothing, and the publisher has printed no rule that would restrict who may take part or how often a person may submit for this volleyball poll.

What a supporter cannot read off the ballot page is the calendar. The poll form itself carries no printed open or close date, so anyone planning around the deadline needs to watch Delaware Online's sports coverage through July and August or revisit the live poll to see whether it is still accepting votes. The same applies to the nominee list: the pairing of players and schools is set fresh each preseason, and the only current version of it lives on the ballot itself. A vote cast for a player from a prior season's list does not carry forward, because each edition runs as its own separate poll on the platform.

Where this volleyball ballot sits among Delaware's reader awards

Delaware Online is not the only publisher running public athlete votes in the state, but the preseason volleyball award occupies a slot none of its neighbours fill. The publisher's own weekly series, the Football Athlete of the Week and the Winter Athlete of the Week, run during the seasons they cover. The SI-backed series covers football and both basketball seasons under the Sports Illustrated brand. The 302Sports.com Athlete of the Week comes from an entirely separate publisher. None of those five asks readers to rank players before a season begins, and none covers girls volleyball.

That makes the preseason volleyball vote the only summer-placed, forward-looking ballot in this group of Delaware programs. It also makes it the only one of the six whose result cannot be checked against a completed schedule, which is part of its appeal: the award measures expectation, not production. For a Delaware volleyball family, the practical consequence is timing. Support has to be organized in July or early August, before the first serve, or the chance passes for that year.

The shared platform is the other connecting thread. Every one of these Delaware ballots, from the weekly polls to the preseason volleyball question, runs through Crowdsignal on poll.fm, so a reader who has voted in one knows the interface of the others immediately. The differences are in the calendar and the subject matter, not the mechanics. A supporter moving from a winter basketball poll to the preseason volleyball ballot needs no instruction, only the new link from Delaware Online's coverage when the next preseason arrives.

Building support for a Delaware preseason volleyball nominee

Because this ballot runs once per preseason, a support push has to be built quickly and aimed at the right audience. The vote's natural base is the school community behind each nominee: teammates, parents, alumni and the volleyball families who follow Delaware high school sport every fall. Passing the poll.fm link directly to those circles, with the nominee's name and school spelled out, removes every step between a supporter and a submitted vote. A message that lands in July has two months of window to work with; one that lands after the preseason closes has none.

Delaware Online has published no rule covering outside help in this volleyball vote, which cuts both ways: nothing forbids organized sharing, and nothing guarantees that unusual vote patterns will be tolerated either. The publisher's weekly polls are the closest guide to its expectations, and those are treated as ordinary reader engagement. The honest position for any nominee's camp is that visible, genuine community support is the durable kind, and that no purchased shortcut carries a guarantee in a publisher-run poll. For a fuller picture of what strengthening support involves, our votes guide walks through approaches that hold up on public ballots like this Delaware volleyball question.