Gainesville Sun Preseason Boys Soccer Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gainesville Sun Preseason Boys Soccer Player of the Year is

Run by The Gainesville Sun, the daily newspaper serving Gainesville, Florida, and published under its gainesville.com brand, this award asks supporters to pick the standout high school boys soccer player heading into the season. That is why it carries the preseason label rather than an end-of-season one.

The voting itself does not sit on the newspaper's own site. The Sun uses Crowdsignal for the ballot, and the confirmed address is poll.fm/14694615. That page is where the nominee list and the vote action live.

The nominees come from high school communities around Gainesville and the smaller towns nearby. The 2024 ballot carried players tied to Keystone Heights, Newberry, Williston, Bell and Gainesville itself, among others, so the award reaches well beyond the city limits into the surrounding school districts.

On the page, the format is simple: nominees are listed, a supporter selects one and submits. There is no jury, no separate nomination round visible on the ballot, and no paid voting tier on the poll page.

The dated record: 2023, 2024 and the November window

The program has two confirmed editions: 2023 and 2024. That back-to-back pair is what earns the program its annual status, since the Sun ran the preseason poll in consecutive years and used the same Crowdsignal ballot format for both.

The 2024 edition carried a November voting window. The ballot opened and closed within that month, and the poll page now carries a closed marker, which is how a finished Crowdsignal poll presents itself. The day the poll opened and the day it closed were never printed in a dated form the Sun kept attached to the ballot.

The 2024 result is the one counted outcome available. When the poll closed, the nominee from Bell led the field at 43 percent, on 3,946 votes. That figure matters for two reasons: it shows the poll reached a real voting audience, and it shows the Sun publishes the tally openly rather than hiding the count behind a press release.

What the Sun has not published is a category list for the ballot, a nomination procedure, or any rule text covering repeat voting or eligibility. The newspaper also has not stated whether a 2025 or later edition exists, or in which month a future window would fall; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the preseason soccer poll

Voting in the Gainesville Sun Preseason Boys Soccer Player of the Year is deliberately simple, because the Sun is using the poll to drive reader engagement rather than to gate it behind registration.

The route is short: open the poll.fm page the Sun links from its coverage, read the nominee list, and select the player you want to back. Each nominee is presented with the community the player represents, so a voter from Newberry, Williston or Keystone Heights can find their school's player by town as easily as by name. The selection is submitted on the same page, and the poll counts it.

Three things are worth knowing before the vote is cast. First, the ballot is a single question; there is no category navigation, no write-in box and no second round visible on the page. Second, the poll closes hard: the 2024 edition is now marked closed, and a closed Crowdsignal poll accepts no further votes, so timing matters more than anything else in this program. Third, the Sun prints no rule about returning to vote again on another day, and no account step appears on the ballot, so the visible mechanic is simply select and submit.

Because the window is short and the close is final, supporters who want their nominee to win should treat the open period as the whole campaign. The votes guide covers how community-driven pushes work in polls of this shape.

How this ballot sits beside its Central Florida neighbours

The Sun's preseason soccer award is not the only Florida high school reader poll of its kind, but it is structurally different from the nearest cluster of programs, which all run out of Central Florida under a weekly format.

The sibling programs are the Central Florida Flag Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Baseball Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week and the Central Florida High School Girls Flag Football Player of the Week.

Those six are weekly series: a fresh ballot opens each week of a season, and each week is its own small contest. The Gainesville Sun program is the opposite shape. It is a single preseason award, one ballot per edition, run once before the boys soccer season starts, and it covers a different market, Gainesville and its surrounding towns rather than the Central Florida corridor.

The calendar is where the difference lands for a supporter. A weekly ballot rewards fast, repeated engagement across a season, while this preseason poll concentrates the entire vote into a short November window in 2024's case. Both share the same host platform, Crowdsignal at poll.fm, so the voting experience on the page itself feels nearly identical.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this poll

Because this is a preseason award decided by a short public vote, the campaigns that move the needle are the ones organized around a school community rather than around the ballot itself. The 2024 result makes the point: the winning nominee from Bell finished at 43 percent on 3,946 votes, a margin built on a small town's ability to turn out its voters inside a window that lasted only part of November.

The Sun attaches no rules text to the ballot page about outside assistance, automated voting or vote purchasing, so there is no published policy to lean on either way. What is visible is the mechanic: a plain Crowdsignal poll, open for a limited stretch, counting every submitted selection. Support that depends on the nominee's own network, shared through team group chats, school pages and family networks in towns like Newberry and Keystone Heights, fits that mechanic without any grey area.

If a supporter is weighing paid votes for this specific ballot, the honest starting point is the organizer's silence: no rule is printed, and no promise about outcomes can be made by anyone. The service overview at buy votes online and the award-specific page at buy award votes describe the general landscape without speaking for the Sun.