Who is the SJ-R's football player of the year around Springfield: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the SJ-R football player of the year ballot is and who runs it

The SJ-R, the newspaper covering Springfield, Illinois, asks its readers a seasonal question: who is its football player of the year around Springfield? The vote runs on Crowdsignal through the poll.fm domain, and the ballot for the most recent cycle sits at poll.fm/16389770. The program covers high school football in and around Springfield, drawing nominees from school communities across the area rather than from a single roster.

Towns represented among the ballot options include Rochester, Athens, Industry, Pawnee and Pana, alongside Springfield itself. The format is a public vote: readers pick from a listed field of nominees, each shown beside the school or community the player represents. Because the ballot names high school athletes, this page describes the field by school community and town and does not print individual names.

The newspaper promotes the vote through its sports coverage, and the ballot itself is hosted away from the newspaper's site on Crowdsignal infrastructure. That split matters for supporters and for any business hoping to back a nominee: the question, the nominee list, the voting controls and the result all live on the poll.fm page, not on a landing page of the paper's own. Related Illinois ballots from other publishers, such as the Herald-News Joliet Athlete of the Week, follow a similar publisher-plus-platform shape.

The dated record for this football player of the year vote

Two cycles of this ballot are confirmed so far, in 2023 and 2025. That run qualifies it as an annual program, with a further cycle expected in 2026. The listing for the most recent ballot is headed Poll Closed, so the live page currently shows a finished vote rather than an open one.

The dated facts the ballot itself carries are narrow. Its printed close is noon on Friday, August 21. The final line shows the leading nominee finishing at 37 percent on 626 votes, a figure the poll page prints beside Williamsville. Beyond those, the page prints no opening day and no nomination round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the SJ-R does not publish is just as fixed. No category list appears, because the ballot asks a single question with a single field of nominees. No per-supporter limit, no daily return rule and no eligibility text is printed on the page either. A supporter who wants the exact window for the next cycle has to read it from the newspaper's sports coverage or from the live ballot itself. Anything else about timing, including whether a future edition shifts its dates, is simply not stated anywhere the public can read.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

Voting is deliberately plain. A supporter opens the ballot at poll.fm, reads the question, and picks from the listed nominees, each shown beside the school or town the player represents. A selection is confirmed with the platform's submit control, and Crowdsignal logs the choice without any account or login step shown on the page. Because the listing is headed Poll Closed, that sequence describes what a supporter would have done during the open window rather than today; the page now reports results instead of accepting picks.

The result display is part of the mechanic. After close, the platform shows each nominee's share, and on this ballot the printed outcome is a 37 percent finish on 626 votes for the leading name. Supporters who want to check the outcome can read it straight from the same URL they used to vote, without visiting the newspaper's site.

No supporter account, no fee and no registration appears anywhere on the ballot page. There is no paid voting path in this program: the SJ-R offers nothing to buy, and the platform's public poll format is free. Vendors that sell votes for public polls, described on the award votes page, operate outside the newspaper's process, and whether outside votes would count is a matter for the organizer, whose published rules do not address it.

How this ballot sits beside its Illinois neighbours

The SJ-R ballot is not the only public-vote sports program in Illinois with a page on this site, and the differences are mostly about shape. The Herald & Review Illinois Player of the Week and the Daily Chronicle DeKalb County Athlete of the Week run on a weekly rhythm, naming a fresh field during a season. The Illinois SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Illinois SI Football Class 1A Player of the Year ask end-of-season questions about a whole classification.

The SJ-R program sits in the player-of-the-year family: an annual, single-question ballot rather than a weekly series. Its geographic footprint is also tighter than the statewide entries. The field draws from the towns around Springfield, including Rochester, Athens, Industry, Pawnee and Pana, so a result reflects a compact readership area rather than the entire state. That concentration matters to anybody supporting a nominee, because the pool of voters is the newspaper's own local audience, and the Joliet weekly answers to a different publisher with a different market. Each program runs under its own organizer, on the same Crowdsignal platform family, with its own window and its own result page.