Athens Banner-Herald preseason softball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

A reader poll behind the Athens Banner-Herald's softball coverage

The Athens Banner-Herald is the daily newspaper for Athens, Georgia, publishing at onlineathens.com. Each summer its sports desk builds a preseason feature around high school softball, and the player of the year ballot is the interactive piece attached to it. Readers, not editors, decide the result: the paper supplies the nominee list, and the community supplies the votes.

The voting form sits on Crowdsignal, a polling service reached at poll.fm. The current ballot address is poll.fm/15734024, and the page title carries the paper's name alongside the edition year, so a supporter arriving from a search engine can tell at a glance whose poll they have landed on. As the ballot options are students, this guide describes the program without naming any of them; the full list of players and their schools sits on the live ballot.

The shape of the exercise is familiar to anyone who follows Georgia high school sports coverage. Papers and broadcasters across the state run similar reader votes, from the AJC's weekly girls flag football coaching award to BLITZ Sports' football player of the week. What separates the Athens Banner-Herald's version is the cadence: it is a preseason poll tied to the softball calendar rather than a weekly series, so the whole vote runs inside a short July window and produces a single winner.

The dated record: 2023, 2025 and the July window

Editions of the poll ran in 2023 and 2025, which is the basis for treating it as an annual fixture, with the next edition expected in 2026. The 2025 ballot carried the edition year in its title and closed during July: the paper stated the poll would remain open until Wednesday, July 29, at 5 p.m., and that the winner would be announced on Monday, Aug. 10. That gives supporters a rough template for the shape of a cycle, a preseason vote in July followed by an announcement before the school season starts.

What the paper has not printed is the fine print. There is no published opening date for the next cycle, no category roster past the one player-of-the-year question on the form, no statement on whether one supporter may return to vote, and nothing on who qualifies as a voter. Anyone planning around those details should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The platform's own page does carry some useful state information: the 2025 poll is marked closed, so a visitor landing on poll.fm/15734024 today sees a frozen result rather than a live form. A fresh edition, once the paper posts it, arrives as a new poll address linked from the softball coverage on onlineathens.com, which is why checking the paper's site is the reliable way to find the current ballot.

Casting a ballot on the Crowdsignal form

Voting takes almost no effort. A supporter opens the poll address, sees a list of nominated players each shown beside her school, clicks the selector next to her choice, and hits the Vote control. The form registers the submission and displays the running tally. No account, login or email entry is part of the published flow, so the whole action takes seconds on a phone.

The live ballot is also where the results appear. After the 2025 poll closed, the page shifted into a results view showing the final percentages each nominee finished with, so the tally doubles as the announcement preview ahead of the paper's own Aug. 10 declaration. A supporter checking back during the window can watch the standings move.

Two practical notes follow from that setup. First, the poll's address changes with each edition, because Crowdsignal issues a new poll for each new ballot, so an address bookmarked during an earlier summer lands on a closed poll rather than the current one. Second, the form applies whatever repeat-voting protections Crowdsignal runs by default, and the paper has not documented those protections anywhere, so a supporter coming back to vote again should expect the platform itself to decide whether the second ballot counts.

Where this poll sits among Georgia's other fan votes

The Athens Banner-Herald poll belongs to a crowded Georgia field of reader-decided sports awards. Other programs on this site cover the same state: the AJC's weekly girls flag football coaching award, BLITZ Sports' Georgia football player of the week, Fox 5 Atlanta's High 5 Sports team of the week, and statewide player-of-the-week ballots for baseball, boys basketball and defensive football. Each runs on its own publisher's calendar and its own platform.

What makes the softball poll different is its rhythm and its subject. The weekly ballots reset every few days through a season, while this one is a single preseason question with a July window and a single winner. Its subject is individual recognition for softball players, a sport the Georgia weekly ballots rarely headline, which gives the paper's poll a clearer lane among area readers.

For a nominee's circle, that difference matters. A weekly series rewards repeated mobilization across many rounds, while a short preseason window rewards concentrated outreach: putting the poll.fm address before a school community early, before attention drifts to the start of the season. The live ballot and the paper's players-to-watch article are the two links worth circulating, since together they carry both the voting form and the context behind the nominations.

Strengthening support inside a short July window

Because the whole vote runs inside a brief preseason span, the strongest campaigns start the day the poll goes live rather than the week it closes. The organizer publishes no guidance on outside help, so the safe playbook is the ordinary one: circulate the ballot address through team group chats, school booster pages and softball community groups around Athens, and encourage every contact to submit a ballot and pass it along. For tactics matched to the platform's mechanics, our award votes page explains how short-window ballots differ from week-long series. Whatever route a supporter takes, the paper's silence on outside votes is not the same as an invitation, and no purchase can be counted on to swing a result the newsroom scores and announces itself.