The Volleyball Player of the Year Around Springfield: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who runs the Springfield volleyball vote, and for what market

The State Journal-Register publishes The Volleyball Player of the Year Around Springfield, a single-question volleyball fan ballot for the Springfield, Illinois area. Readers know the paper locally as the SJ-R, and Crowdsignal hosts its ballot at poll.fm/16301652, where the question reads plainly: "Who is the volleyball player of the year around Springfield?"

The SJ-R supplies the nominee list for that single question, and a fan's whole task is to read the field and back one name. Springfield is the only place this program names on its own platform; nothing wider than that market is stated anywhere the SJ-R has published about the ballot. The newsroom's own domain, sj-r.com, carries the wider Springfield sports coverage that surrounds the poll.fm link each season.

The format matches how the SJ-R runs its other year-end sports honors: one question, one field of nominees, one closing tally, rather than a multi-category readers' poll.

The dated history: two confirmed rounds, one calibrated month

Two years are confirmed for this program: 2023 and 2025. The SJ-R's own poll.fm identifier for the 2025 round calibrates to November, which puts the volleyball honor in the same late-fall stretch several year-end prep awards use once a season wraps.

Beyond that single month, the SJ-R has not published the day the 2025 round opened, the day it closed, or a separate nomination step ahead of voting. The 2023 round is confirmed only as a year, with no month attached to it in what the SJ-R has made public.

Whether a 2026 round exists yet, and what exact dates or per-voter rule it might carry, is not settled by anything published so far; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a fan votes on the Springfield ballot

Voting on The Volleyball Player of the Year Around Springfield follows the single-question format Crowdsignal provides: open the poll.fm/16301652 link, read the volleyball nominees the SJ-R has listed, choose one, and submit. No account or login step appears on the ballot.

Because the program crowns one volleyball honor per season rather than running weekly rounds, the same poll.fm link stays live for the whole November stretch instead of resetting every few days the way some of the SJ-R's other sports ballots do.

The SJ-R has not published a per-voter limit, an eligibility rule, or a residency requirement tied to Springfield for this volleyball vote. Nothing confirms whether a fan may submit the ballot once or return to vote again before the round closes. Once the round ends, the poll.fm page swaps from an open ballot to a closed-poll status, which is the SJ-R's own signal that voting for that season's volleyball honor has wrapped.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

The Volleyball Player of the Year Around Springfield sits among several other Illinois prep-sports fan ballots, each answering to a different publisher and a different rulebook. Herald-News Joliet Athlete of the Week and Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week both reset on a weekly schedule during their seasons rather than crowning one name per year.

Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week covers a different Illinois county under a separate masthead, and the statewide pair, Illinois SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and Illinois SI Football Class 1A Player of the Year, reach across the whole state by sport and classification rather than by one paper's own coverage area.

None of these ballots pool a tally with the SJ-R's volleyball vote or with each other. What sets this one apart is its shape, one sport, one Springfield-area market, one November-anchored round rather than a weekly reset or a statewide field. For a Springfield volleyball supporter, that separation matters most around results: nothing from the Illinois SI honors or the county-level weekly polls carries over into how the SJ-R counts its own volleyball tally.

Building support before the November round closes

Because The Volleyball Player of the Year Around Springfield crowns one name for the whole season, building support is a matter of turnout during the live November window rather than repeated daily visits. Passing the poll.fm/16301652 link through team, school and family networks, and asking each supporter to submit their own single choice, fits a format with no separate nomination round to plan around first. That single-round shape also means a late push in the final days before the poll closes can matter as much as steady support built up across the whole November window.

The SJ-R has not stated a position on outside help, paid promotion or voting software for this ballot anywhere published, so no claim about what the paper permits or blocks can be drawn from the page itself. Buying votes online covers what outside support for a single-question fan vote typically involves, and is buying votes legal lays out the legal and policy questions worth reading first.