The Peoria Journal Star High School Girls' Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What this Peoria area poll is and who runs it

The Peoria Journal Star, the daily newspaper serving Peoria, Illinois, runs a fan vote that asks its readers a direct question about the season: which player deserves to be called the area's best high school girls' basketball player. The 2026 edition carried that question plainly, framed around the newspaper's name and the season's race, and offered readers a list of nominees drawn from high schools across the region to choose between.

Crowdsignal, which runs the poll.fm service, hosts the form itself. This is a common arrangement for newspaper fan votes: the publisher writes the coverage and promotes the poll, while the platform runs the form and counts the responses. The voting address for this program is poll.fm/16675005, and the organizer's own sports story for the 2026 season embedded the same poll beneath its article, so supporters could reach it either from the newspaper page or from the platform link directly.

In this directory the program is filed as a sport vertical award with a public-vote mechanic: the reader picks a nominee, the newspaper publishes the result, and no entry fee or judging panel sits between the fan and the outcome. Confirmed details are gathered below.

The dated record, from 2023 to the closed 2026 poll

Two edition years sit on this program, 2023 and 2026, and that pair is what gives it annual standing in this directory instead of single-run status. The latest run on the books is 2026, and its ballot page now carries a Poll Closed notice, so that season's window has passed. The platform dated the 2026 poll to February, and the organizer's own coverage gave the endpoint in plain terms: the poll, embedded below the story, would remain open until noon on Wednesday, March 4, 2026.

Missing from everything the newspaper has published is the rest of the schedule and the rulebook: no opening date for the 2026 poll, no start date for a future edition, no category roster past the lone award, and no per-supporter limit or eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Even with those holes, the fixed points carry the planning. A supporter looking toward 2027 knows the program ran in 2023 and 2026, knows the 2026 window ended at noon on March 4, and knows the ballot address stays the same between runs. Dates for the next edition will surface on the live page when the newspaper publishes its story and the poll goes live, and the Poll Closed heading is the clearest signal that a season has ended.

Casting a choice on the Crowdsignal form

Supporters follow a short path. They reach poll.fm/16675005, where the Crowdsignal form presents the player of the year question and, beneath it, the nominee list. Each nominee appears as a labelled choice, and the supporter selects the one to back, sends the form, and receives confirmation on screen that the response went through. No account creation, payment step or category navigation appears on the 2026 ballot.

Because the poll is single-question, the choice a supporter makes is the whole ballot. There is no write-in box shown on the page, and the nominee list is fixed by the newspaper when it launches the poll alongside its coverage. The newspaper's 2026 story invited readers to cast a vote in the poll provided below, which is the same phrasing it uses for fan ballots across its sports desk.

What the ballot does not show is any instruction about returning. Nothing on the page addresses repeat submissions, cookies, or IP-based handling, and the newspaper publishes no rules text alongside the poll. A supporter who wants certainty on repeat voting should read the live form during an open window, since that is the only place the behaviour for this poll can be seen first-hand.

Arriving after a season ends, as is the case now, shows the Poll Closed heading and the final state of the ballot rather than a live form.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

This program is one of several Illinois public-vote ballots in this directory, and the differences are worth naming. The Herald-News Joliet Athlete of the Week and the Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week run on weekly cycles tied to the school sports calendar, while the Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week is anchored to a single county. This program, by contrast, is a season-capping award rather than a weekly honour.

The closest structural relative is the Illinois SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year, which mirrors the same shape, a season-long award decided by a reader vote, for the boys game under a different publisher. The Illinois SI football programs, the Class 1A and Class 4A player of the year ballots, follow the same publisher's model across a different sport.

What marks this ballot out is its publisher and its market. The Peoria Journal Star is the local daily for Peoria, Illinois, and its poll draws its nominees from the high schools its sports desk already covers, which gives the ballot a defined local audience. The vote is announced through the newspaper's own coverage rather than a standalone campaign site, and the award lands at the end of the girls' basketball season rather than weekly.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Because the ballot is a single-choice Crowdsignal form, support for a nominee is built the direct way: more people reaching poll.fm/16675005 and submitting for that player before the deadline. The organizer's own 2026 story said the poll would stay open until noon on Wednesday, March 4, 2026, which set a hard cutoff, and a poll marked Poll Closed accepts nothing further. Any push therefore has to be timed against the live window, not the closed page.

The newspaper has published no rules text for this poll, so there is no stated organizer position on outside voting help, paid or otherwise, to point to either way. What is visible is the form's ordinary behaviour: a submit action, an on-screen confirmation, and nothing on the page inviting repeat attempts. For a rounded view of how supporters strengthen a position on public ballots of this kind, see this site's guide to getting more votes online, and for award-shaped ballots specifically, the award votes page collects the relevant background.

The practical takeaway for this program is timing and reach. The window is short, anchored to the end of the girls' basketball season, the audience is local, and the ballot address is stable between editions, so a supporter organizing early for the 2027 season has the pieces in place before the newspaper publishes its story.