Athens Banner-Herald Preseason Volleyball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

A preseason award, not a weekly series: what this ballot is and who runs it

Most fan-vote programs in Georgia sports coverage run week after week: the Falcons Girls Flag Football Coach of the Week at the AJC, the BLITZ Sports GA Football Player of the Week, and the Fox 5 Atlanta High 5 Sports Team of the Week all reset on a weekly cycle. The Athens Banner-Herald Preseason Volleyball Player of the Year works differently. It is a single award ballot, tied to the start of the high school volleyball season, run by one newspaper for one readership.

The organizer is the Athens Banner-Herald, the daily newspaper serving Athens, Georgia, publishing under the onlineathens.com domain. Its voting form lives at https://poll.fm/15832152 on Crowdsignal, the platform carrying the paper's preseason volleyball coverage. The vertical is sport, and the audience is the northeast Georgia volleyball community that follows the paper's preseason coverage.

That single-ballot shape is the page's defining fact. A supporter gets one preseason window to rally a school community, and after the poll closes the same address becomes the permanent result page.

The dated record: 2023 and 2025 editions, an August window, and what is not printed

This volleyball award has run in two confirmed years, 2023 and 2025. The 2025 ballot carried the title Athens Banner-Herald preseason volleyball player of the year 2025 and is now marked Poll Closed on poll.fm, which makes the 2025 edition the most recent confirmed run. The timing evidence places the 2025 window in August, an open and close inside one month, which fits a preseason award that resolves before conference play begins.

The closed 2025 ballot shows its final standings publicly, with the leading result displayed at 23 percent. The option list drew from area programs including Apalachee and Athens Academy, the schools named on the confirmed page. Because individual nominees are high school students, the field is described here by school and season rather than by nominee name.

The precise calendar is the gap in this program's public footprint. The Athens Banner-Herald prints no exact open and close dates for its volleyball ballot on the poll.fm page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No promotion schedule for this market exists beyond the ballot itself, so round timing is equally absent. What is solid is the pattern: an August window in 2025, a confirmed 2023 edition before it, and an annual classification resting on those two years.

How a supporter votes on the Athens Banner-Herald volleyball ballot

Voting here takes a few clicks and no account. During the open window, a backer of an Athens-area volleyball player loads the poll.fm ballot, reads the listed field of preseason nominees, picks one radio button and presses the button beneath the option list on the Crowdsignal form. The page confirms the choice at once and updates the tally. No nomination round, no write-in box and no bracket structure appear on the confirmed 2025 page; the award is one ballot, one choice, one result.

That shape carries two consequences for supporters. First, because the window sat inside August in 2025, the campaign period is short: a school community that waits until the final days has little runway, so sharing early in the window is the move that fits this ballot. Second, the poll.fm page prints no rules text of its own. There is no published statement about repeat voting, eligibility or outside help attached to the Athens Banner-Herald's volleyball ballot, so a supporter who wants certainty on any of those points has to read the live form during the window it is open.

After close, the same URL flips into a results page, which is exactly what the 2025 address does now, displaying final percentages for every option that stood on the ballot.

Where this ballot sits among Georgia's fan-vote programs

Within Georgia's public-vote field, this award is the volleyball entry, and that alone separates it from its neighbours. The Georgia Baseball Player of the Week, the Georgia Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the Georgia Football Defensive Player of the Week all cover different sports, and all three run on a weekly rhythm. The Athens Banner-Herald's volleyball award is a once-per-season ballot instead, concentrated into a single August window.

The publisher footprint differs too. The weekly programs answer to metro Atlanta outlets or statewide sports platforms, while this one belongs to a single Athens newspaper whose coverage area centers on Athens and the surrounding northeast Georgia school communities, Apalachee and Athens Academy among the confirmed 2025 options. That narrower reach cuts both ways: the ballot is smaller than a statewide football vote, and a well-organized single school community can move the result in a way that is much harder in a statewide weekly series.

For a supporter comparing programs, the practical difference is timing and focus. Weekly ballots reward sustained turnout across a season; this preseason award rewards one concentrated push at the start of the volleyball year, then closes and publishes its final percentages on the same poll.fm page.

Strengthening support in a short preseason poll

Because the Athens Banner-Herald's volleyball ballot compresses its whole window into August, effective support looks different here than in a weekly series. The organizer prints no rules on the poll.fm page about outside help, so nobody outside the newsroom can say where its tolerance sits; the live form is the only arbiter. What a school community can control is turnout: player families, team accounts and the Athens Academy or Apalachee parent networks sharing the poll.fm link during the opening days of the August window, when the tally is still small and every vote moves the visible percentage. For a fuller playbook aimed at exactly this kind of short public ballot, see how to get more votes online, and for award-shaped contests specifically, the award votes page covers the category.