Ivy Tech Journal & Courier 1A/2A Softball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Ivy Tech Journal & Courier 1A/2A Softball Player of the Year is

The Ivy Tech Journal & Courier 1A/2A Softball Player of the Year award goes to the nominee who wins an open fan vote across Indiana high school softball's two smallest classes. It is run by the Journal & Courier, the Lafayette-area Indiana newspaper whose sports desk publishes its high school coverage at jconline.com. The title carries both names in a single line: Ivy Tech sponsors the award, and the Journal & Courier publishes the ballot. Crowdsignal's poll.fm service hosts the voting, and the live ballot for the program sits at poll.fm/17132900.

The award covers Indiana softball programs in the 1A and 2A classes. The 2026 ballot listed nominees from Southmont, Rossville, Clinton Prairie, Covington, Delphi and Tri-County, each identified by name and school. That school list is the clearest picture of the ballot's footprint: small-town Indiana athletic programs across the western part of the state, with Rossville, Covington and Delphi among the towns represented.

Because the winner is decided purely by fan submissions, the outcome rests on how many people each nominee's community can rally to the ballot before the poll closes. For quick reference, the program's fixed details are collected in the table underneath.

The dated record for the Journal & Courier softball award

Editions of the softball award are confirmed in 2023 and 2026, and those two years are what qualify the program as annual. The most recent ballot ran with a voting window that opened in September and closed in November 2026, and the poll now carries a closed marker, so the 2026 count is finished.

The final standings from that closed ballot are public on the poll page itself. The Tri-County nominee finished at the top with 32 percent of the vote, a total of 14,427 votes. The Rossville nominee was second at 25 percent, on 11,204 votes. Those per-nominee figures are the only numbers the ballot publishes; no overall turnout figure beyond the individual counts appears anywhere on it.

What the Journal & Courier has not printed on the ballot is the exact open and close date pair, any nomination process, or a rule limiting repeat votes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. For the next edition nothing has been announced either: no date for the 2027 ballot has been posted, and the September-to-November pattern of the 2026 run is the only timing guide the program currently offers.

How a supporter votes in the 1A/2A softball poll

Voting happens at poll.fm/17132900, the Crowdsignal page the Journal & Courier uses for this award, and the mechanics are simple pick-and-submit. When the poll is open, the page lists each nominee with her school beside her name, a selector next to each option, and a submit control at the bottom. A supporter picks a nominee and submits; the poll page then shows the running percentage and vote count for every option, which is how the 32 percent and 14,427 vote figures for the Tri-County nominee became visible during the 2026 run.

Right now that sequence is paused, because the 2026 ballot is marked closed and the selector no longer accepts choices. When the Journal & Courier posts the next softball ballot, it will surface through the publisher's high school sports coverage at jconline.com and on its poll.fm page, with the same pick-and-submit mechanic.

The ballot prints no account requirement, no login step and no per-person voting limit, and it does not state whether repeat submissions from the same device are filtered. Those are details a supporter can only read off the live form when the next edition opens. Nothing on the published page indicates a nomination round separate from voting either; the nominee list simply appears when the poll goes live.

How this softball ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

The Journal & Courier softball ballot sits in a crowded Indiana field of reader-voted sports awards, and it helps to separate it from its neighbours so supporters land on the right page. Within this site's Indiana coverage, the closest siblings by shape are the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week, a weekly statewide vote, and the season-long Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year plus the Indiana SI Football 3A and 4A Player of the Year awards. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week and the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year belong to different publishers and different markets entirely.

What makes the Journal & Courier program distinct is its scope. It is a class-limited softball award, restricted to 1A and 2A programs, sponsored by Ivy Tech and run by a single Lafayette-area newspaper, whereas the SI football awards split by class across a wider field and the football player of the week resets weekly. Each of these ballots belongs to its own publisher, with its own platform page and its own window, so a vote cast on a single ballot counts only there. Supporters looking for the softball award should use the poll.fm/17132900 URL directly rather than a general search.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Because this award is decided by raw public vote totals, the practical way a nominee's supporters strengthen her position is by widening the circle of people who actually submit the ballot. During the September-to-November window that means the school's own channels: team parents, the athletic program's social accounts, and local community groups in towns like Rossville, Covington and Delphi, each of which had a nominee on the 2026 ballot.

The Journal & Courier publishes no stated rule on organized vote drives for this softball poll, so the safe reading is the plain reading: support should come from real people who genuinely want to back the nominee. Our guide on how to get more votes online walks through outreach suited to a small-school ballot like this one, and for where promotion ends and rule-breaking begins, the legality page covers the question directly.