The Ledger Midseason Football Player of the Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who runs the midseason football poll and who votes in it

The midseason football poll that The Ledger runs is, at heart, a high school football vote staged by the Florida newspaper behind theledger.com. It asks readers to pick a midseason player of the year from a slate of nominees drawn from football communities across the paper's coverage area, with towns named on the ballot including Lakeland, Auburndale, Bartow, Davenport, Fort Meade, Lake Wales and Mulberry. The vote is a plain public ballot: any reader who opens the page can weigh in, and the result is decided entirely by the tally of supporter clicks rather than by a panel of judges.

The Ledger's midseason ballot is a Crowdsignal poll carried at poll.fm, and the confirmed voting address for the programme is https://poll.fm/14412622. That address carried the most recent confirmed edition, which the poll page now marks as closed. The newspaper publishes the vote at the midpoint of the football season, which is what gives the programme its midseason label, and no sponsor promotion for this market is attached to the ballot.

Community support is the whole engine of the result. Because the winner is the nominee whose town and school community turns out hardest, the poll functions locally as a pride contest between neighbouring football communities as much as an individual honour. The table below gathers the programme's fixed facts in one place.

The dated record: 2023 and 2024 editions and the September window

Confirmed editions of the poll ran in 2023 and 2024, and the programme is annual by the measure of those edition years. The voting window falls in September: the timing places both the opening and the closing of the live vote inside that month, in the 2024 cycle as in the cycle before it. What the newspaper has not printed anywhere alongside the ballot is the exact day the window opens and the exact day it closes, so supporters planning a push should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The most recent confirmed ballot, poll 14412622, is marked closed on the poll.fm page. Its final tally is public: the nominee from Mulberry finished at 45 percent on 2,756 votes, and the nominee from Fort Meade finished immediately behind at 44 percent on 2,698 votes. A margin that narrow shows how much weight a single organised community can carry in this format, since a few hundred redirected supporters would have been enough to flip the result.

Beyond the 2023 and 2024 editions, the newspaper has not stated which year the next edition falls in, and no nomination round dates are published either. The midseason timing is the only scheduling anchor supporters have: the poll appears at the midpoint of the football season, inside September, and then closes. Everything else about the calendar, including whether the 2026 season carries a fresh ballot and when its window opens, is a matter for the live page.

How a supporter votes in The Ledger's midseason football poll

Voting takes almost no effort. A supporter opens The Ledger's ballot at https://poll.fm/14412622, reads through the slate of nominees, each listed with a position and the town the player represents, clicks the choice they want, and submits the vote. Crowdsignal, the platform behind poll.fm, presents this as a straightforward public poll: the options appear as a list, the standings can be visible on the page, and the tally updates as votes arrive. No nomination form, essay or registration step sits in front of the vote itself.

The rule set around the vote is another matter. The Ledger sets out no limit on repeat voting, no rule about daily returns, and no eligibility statement for this midseason poll, and the poll.fm page for the closed 2024 edition carries no rules text either. A supporter who wants to vote repeatedly, or who is organising a coordinated push from a school community, therefore has no printed rule to measure their behaviour against, and the honest position is that the live ballot is the final word on what is allowed.

Because the confirmed 2024 ballot is closed, a supporter arriving today cannot cast a vote on it. The action available now is to watch for the next September window and to vote when the fresh ballot appears at the newspaper's poll.fm address.

Where this poll sits among The Ledger's Central Florida neighbours

The midseason player of the year poll is not the only public vote The Ledger runs. Six sibling programmes share the same Florida high school sports beat, all built as weekly honours rather than midseason awards: 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.

The difference is cadence and scope. The weekly ballots recur through their sports' seasons and reset every week, while the midseason poll is a single September event that decides a player of the year at the season's halfway point. A supporter whose school appears on a weekly ballot in the fall will often find the same community voting again in the midseason poll, and the towns on the 2024 slate, from Lakeland and Auburndale to Bartow, Davenport, Fort Meade and Mulberry, sit inside the same Central Florida coverage area the weekly programmes draw from.

Anyone weighing where to put their effort should note that the midseason ballot is the higher-stakes shape of the two: it settles a year-long honour rather than a weekly award, and its September window gives communities a short, concentrated period in which turnout decides everything.

Strengthening support for a nominee in the midseason poll

Support in this poll is a turnout contest played inside a short September window, which means the communities that win are the ones that organise before the ballot opens rather than after. The mechanic rewards a simple action, a click on The Ledger's poll.fm page, so the practical work is mobilising people to perform it: team parents, booster clubs, student sections and local social media groups. The 2024 result was decided by 2,756 votes against 2,698, a margin small enough that a single well-run school network could plausibly have supplied it.

The Ledger publishes no stated policy on outside help for this midseason ballot, so nothing on the page distinguishes an organised community push from any other kind of participation. What is true of the ballot itself is that votes count as they arrive, and a spread-out effort across the September window is easier for a community to sustain than a single-day spike. For a broader playbook that applies to public votes of this shape, see our guide on how to get more votes online, and for the rules question see whether buying votes is legal.