Fan's Choice for Journal Star Softball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Journal Star softball Fan's Choice vote is

The Fan's Choice award for Journal Star softball is a public-vote honor that the Peoria Journal Star, the Illinois daily newspaper published at pjstar.com, puts in front of its high school softball readership at the end of the spring season. It belongs to the newspaper's athlete-of-the-year family of polls: the sports desk names the softball nominees, and readers, not editors, decide who finishes on top.

The balloting itself runs on Crowdsignal through poll.fm, the platform the Journal Star uses for its reader polls. The 2025 softball edition sat at poll.fm/15541365, and the publisher's own instruction to readers was to head to pjstar.com/sports to vote. The mechanic is a straightforward public vote: a supporter picks one nominee and submits, and the page keeps a running percentage and vote count beside each school's name while the poll is open.

The market is Illinois high school softball. The 2025 ballot drew nominees from schools across the Journal Star's coverage area, including Dunlap, Brimfield/Elmwood, Illini Bluffs, Washington, Abingdon-Avon and Metamora, which is the same mix of central Illinois communities the paper covers through the season.

The dated record for the softball Fan's Choice ballot

For this program the confirmed edition years are 2022 and 2025, which is what makes it an annual fixture of the Peoria Journal Star rather than a one-time promotion. The next cycle is expected in 2026, timed as before to the close of the Illinois high school softball season.

The 2025 edition carried the title "Fan's choice for 2025 Journal Star softball player of the year" and was marked Poll Closed on its Crowdsignal page. Its own dating places the cycle in May, and the page carried the phrase "open until noon Thursday", so the final hours of that window ended at midday on a Thursday. Once the poll closed, the tally froze: the nominee from Brimfield/Elmwood finished first at 34 percent on 1,499 votes, and the Washington nominee was second at 24 percent on 1,073 votes.

Those figures are the only numbers the ballot page prints. The Journal Star has not published a per-reader vote limit, an eligibility rule for the softball nominees, or a fixed opening day for future cycles, so anyone planning around the fine print should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Journal Star softball poll

Voting takes a few minutes and no special access. The Journal Star softball ballot sits on Crowdsignal through poll.fm, and the 2025 edition was reachable at poll.fm/15541365. A supporter who opens that page while the May window is live sees the softball nominees listed with the Illinois school each one represents, exactly as the 2025 page listed Dunlap, Brimfield/Elmwood, Illini Bluffs, Washington, Abingdon-Avon and Metamora.

The action itself is a single selection: mark the radio button for the nominee you back and submit the form. The Crowdsignal page then adds your choice to the running tally, which shows a percentage and a raw vote count beside every school's name. On the 2025 ballot that tally ended with the Brimfield/Elmwood nominee on 34 percent and the Washington nominee on 24 percent, so a supporter could always see whether a push was moving the needle.

Timing matters more than anything else on this ballot. The 2025 page carried an open until noon Thursday close, and after that hour the poll was marked Poll Closed and the tally stopped moving. The Journal Star's sports desk also routes readers through pjstar.com/sports, so a supporter who loses the direct address can reach the current softball poll from the paper's own section. Because no account step is printed on the ballot, the whole process is open, select, submit, and return before the deadline if the publisher's rules allow repeat visits.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

The Journal Star softball Fan's Choice vote is one of several Illinois public-vote programs on this site, and its neighbours help explain what makes it distinctive. The Herald-News Joliet Athlete of the Week and the Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week are weekly reader polls tied to their own publishers, while the Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week serves a county-level readership. The Illinois SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Class 1A and Class 4A football player-of-the-year votes are year-end honors in other sports.

What separates the Journal Star softball ballot from all of them is the combination of sport, season and publisher. It is the only one of these programs devoted to high school softball, it is anchored to May when the Illinois softball season concludes, and it is run by the Peoria Journal Star on Crowdsignal rather than by any of the other Illinois publishers named above. Its nominee list is also drawn from a specific set of central Illinois communities, Dunlap, Brimfield/Elmwood, Illini Bluffs, Washington, Abingdon-Avon and Metamora, rather than from a statewide or countywide pool.

For a supporter, that means the advice that fits a weekly athlete ballot does not transfer automatically: this is a single poll with one closing hour, not a rolling series, so the whole push has to land inside one May window.

Strengthening support before the noon Thursday close

Because this is a single May poll with a hard noon Thursday close rather than a weekly series, the useful work happens before the window opens. A school community that agrees on one nominee, shares the poll.fm address as soon as the Journal Star publishes the ballot, and asks families and alumni to pass it along in the first days has far more room than one that starts in the final hours. The running percentage on the Crowdsignal page, which showed the Brimfield/Elmwood nominee at 34 percent in 2025, tells a supporter quickly whether outreach is working. The Journal Star prints no per-reader vote limit on the softball ballot, so the practical ceiling is whatever the live page enforces. For outreach methods that suit a newspaper fan poll, see how to get more votes online, and for what purchased support involves see award vote packages.