IndyStar Baseball Player of the Week for Weeks: How Voting Works & How to Win

A weekly spring ballot in a field of year-end awards

Most Indiana public-vote programs covered on this site ask readers to name a single season champion, an athlete of the year or a player of the year. This ballot works on a shorter clock. IndyStar, the Indianapolis publisher, runs a weekly poll during the prep baseball season that asks one question: who is the baseball Player of the Week for the stretch of games just played? The most recent ballot covered Weeks 1-2 of the season, and its title asked exactly that.

The contrast with its siblings is structural. The statewide football weekly runs on the same weekly rhythm but in the fall sport. The Evansville Courier & Press year-end football honor and the Indiana SI basketball and football awards are single season-long decisions that accumulate support across months. IndyStar's baseball ballot resets weekly, which means a player who misses one week's list can appear on the next, and a supporter who misses a Friday noon deadline waits only days for a fresh chance.

The host platform matters too. Voting happens on poll.fm, the Crowdsignal polling platform, the same host behind many publisher polls, rather than inside the newspaper's own site. That means the mechanics a supporter sees, a nominee list, a radio button and a running tally, are platform mechanics, while the nominee selection and the weekly schedule belong to IndyStar's prep sports desk.

The dated record: which editions ran and when voting falls

Confirmed editions of this series ran in 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026. The gap in 2024 is simply what the available ballots show; it does not prove the series skipped that spring, and it does not prove it ran either. What the year list does establish is recurrence: a weekly spring series that has come back across at least four separate seasons, with 2026 the most recent and 2027 the natural next question.

The seasonal window runs from April into June. Within it, the pace is weekly: IndyStar has stated in its own coverage that "Voting will remain open until noon on Friday," which gives each ballot a two-to-three-day sprint rather than a month-long run. That deadline shapes everything about how the poll is contested, because a nominee who leads on Wednesday can be passed by Thursday night.

The most recent ballot shows what a finished round looks like. It listed nominees from schools including Roncalli, Mooresville, Noblesville, Tri-West and North Central, and the closing tally had a Fishers nominee first with 47 percent of 27,636 votes, well ahead of an Indianapolis nominee at 19 percent. Communities from Zionsville, Westfield, Franklin and Greenwood also appear across the nominee lists.

One thing the organizer has not printed anywhere on the ballot is a standing list of which week ranges or award categories the series will cover in a given spring; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the live poll.fm ballot

Casting a vote takes little effort. A supporter opens the current ballot link, which sits on a poll.fm address because Crowdsignal hosts the vote. The page shows a single question, the weekly Player of the Week question, followed by a list of nominees. Each nominee is presented with a player name and a school, so a supporter from, say, Noblesville or Fishers can find their own community's athlete at a glance.

Selecting the radio button beside a name and pressing the Vote control submits the choice. Poll.fm ballots typically reveal the running tally after a vote is cast, and this series does the same: the closed Weeks 1-2 ballot displayed final percentages and raw vote counts side by side, 47 percent and 27,636 votes for the leader. That transparency is part of the format, and it means supporters can watch the margin move during the week.

The link on this page is the newest ballot in the weekly run, not a permanent one. Since the series resets each week, every round's ballot closes at the Friday noon deadline IndyStar prints, and a new poll.fm address opens with the next story. The date of the next ballot's opening is set by IndyStar's publishing schedule and is not posted in advance; the publisher's prep sports section is where the fresh link appears first each week of the season.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Indiana supports an unusually dense cluster of public-vote sports ballots, and this one is the only spring baseball weekly in the set covered here. Its nearest neighbour in structure is the fall football weekly run statewide, which shares the weekly-reset mechanic but plays out in autumn and reaches a different set of schools and fans. A household with a baseball player in spring and a football player in fall can realistically support both series without overlap.

The year-end awards make the other half of the comparison. The Bloomington Herald-Times runs its own weekly athlete ballot anchored to a single college town's coverage area, while the Indiana SI boys basketball honor and the Indiana SI football honors for Classes 3A and 4A are statewide single-ballot decisions with classification brackets built into their names. IndyStar's baseball poll borrows the weekly rhythm of the first group and the statewide reach of the second.

What separates this ballot in practice is the deadline pressure. A year-end award accumulates votes for weeks or months, so a school can plan a long campaign. A Friday noon cut-off rewards the communities that mobilize fastest, which is why nominee towns such as Zionsville, Westfield, Franklin, Fishers, Noblesville and Greenwood show up repeatedly: their fan bases turn out early and in volume.

For a broader view of how Indiana publisher polls compare, the Herald-Times athlete ballot and the fall football weekly are the closest reads.

Supporting a nominee in a Friday-noon poll

A weekly ballot with a Friday noon cut-off is won in the first 48 hours. The practical play for a school community is to share the poll.fm link the moment IndyStar publishes the week's story, through team parent groups, school social accounts and Booster clubs, while the ballot is fresh. Because the nominee list changes weekly, every round is a new sprint and last week's effort does not carry over.

The organizer has printed no statement on outside vote help for this series, so supporters should weigh any paid option against the risk that the publisher discounts or removes votes it considers irregular. The mechanics that are confirmed, a public ballot, a noon Friday close, and a visible running tally, all favour genuine, fast community turnout. Tactics suited to publisher polls like this one are collected in our votes guide, and award-style ballots are treated separately at the award votes page.