The Star Press IU Health Female Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Star Press IU Health Female Athlete of the Year is and who runs it

The problem a supporter usually hits with this programme is simple: the ballot is not a standalone website you can find by searching the programme name. It is a Crowdsignal poll embedded at the bottom of a story on The Star Press's own sports coverage, and the paper states plainly that ballots sent by email are discarded. If you arrive at the poll.fm address directly, you are on the right ballot, but the surrounding context, the announcement and the rules, live on the newspaper's page.

The Star Press runs the programme under the IU Health name, and its coverage describes the shape of the exercise directly: two polls run in a two-week stretch, one for Female Athletes of the Year and one for male athletes, featuring one nominee from each East Central Indiana school. That makes this a publisher-run high school sports fan vote for the newspaper's Indiana coverage area, not a statewide or national award, and not a business-promotion contest.

Facts at a glance

Since nominees are minors competing in school sport, this page describes the programme by its publisher, sport, gender and season rather than by naming any individual nominee. The ballot itself carries the names, and the newspaper's announcement story introduces the field.

The dated record for this fan vote

Two editions are on the published timeline: 2025 and 2026. The 2026 ballot carried the title "Who should be The Star Press IU Health Female Athlete of the Year for 2025-26?" and is now marked closed. Its closing point is the firmest date attached to the programme: the paper's coverage stated that the week's poll would remain open until Friday, July 3, at noon, which puts the 2026 voting window in the days leading up to that July deadline.

That is where the published detail ends. The paper has not announced the nomination dates or the category breakdown for this fan vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The platform's round structure is likewise unpublished: no promotion schedule for this market sits alongside the ballot, so the shape of any future edition, its opening day and its length, is unknown until The Star Press publishes the announcement story.

What the two edition years do establish is recurrence. A programme with confirmed runs in 2025 and 2026, both built around a year-end athlete of the year question for the 2025-26 school year, has a pattern a reader can reasonably watch for. The paper's own framing, two polls in two weeks covering female and male athletes of the year, reads as a planned seasonal feature rather than a one-off poll, and the East Central Indiana school-by-school nominee structure supports that reading.

For a supporter planning ahead, the practical takeaway is to watch the paper's prep sports section in the weeks before the next summer window, since that is where the announcement story and the fresh poll embed appear first.

How a supporter votes in this poll today

The mechanic is deliberately plain. The Star Press publishes a story announcing the fan vote, and the Crowdsignal poll sits at the bottom of that story. A reader scrolls down, picks one nominated athlete from the list, and submits. The paper's instruction is explicit that the poll found by scrolling to the bottom of the story is the only counting route, and that votes sent by email do not count, so forwarding a nomination by email accomplishes nothing.

The rate limit is the paper's own sentence: you may vote one time per hour, per device. That phrasing matters for anyone organising support. It is per device, not per person and not per network, so a household with a phone and a laptop holds two independent hourly allowances under the printed rule. It is also hourly, not daily, which makes steady returns across the open window far more productive than a single push.

Because the 2026 ballot is closed, nobody can vote on it now. The sequence above is what a supporter will follow when the next edition's poll goes live, and the fastest way to catch that moment is to follow the paper's prep sports section, where the announcement story with the embedded poll appears. The ballot URL for the confirmed 2026 edition remains poll.fm/17183805, and a future edition will carry its own poll address published alongside the announcement.

Nothing on the ballot page describes verification, eligibility screening or a nomination form for the public. Nominee selection is handled by the paper as part of its editorial coverage, and the reader-facing job begins and ends with casting ballots in the open window.

How this ballot sits beside its Indiana neighbours

Fan votes run by Indiana publishers are plentiful, and this programme occupies a specific slot among them: a year-end, female-only, high school award from a Muncie-area newspaper covering East Central Indiana. It differs from weekly recognition formats in cadence, since the athlete of the year question is asked once per school year rather than every week, and it differs from statewide formats in reach, since the nominee pool is one athlete per East Central Indiana school.

The nearest neighbours on this site make the contrast concrete. The Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week runs on a weekly rhythm from a different publisher and market. The Indiana High School Football Player of the Week is sport-specific and weekly, while the Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year and the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year are year-end awards aimed at boys' or football programmes elsewhere in the state.

What makes this one different for a supporter is the combination of gender, class and season: it is the only programme in this set that asks readers to choose a female high school athlete of the year across all sports for the East Central Indiana coverage area. That also means support built here cannot be recycled into a neighbouring ballot, since every programme in the set has a separate publisher, a separate platform ballot and a separate window.

If you are comparing options for a school's athletes, match the programme to the athlete: a football player in Evansville belongs in the Courier & Press ballot, a weekly standout in Bloomington in the Herald-Times vote, and a multi-sport female athlete at an East Central Indiana school in this one.

Strengthening support within this publisher's rules

Everything about building support here flows from the paper's printed rule: one vote per hour, per device, through the poll at the bottom of the story. A supporter who returns every hour for the length of the window is doing exactly what the rules allow, and that steady accumulation is worth far more than a burst on the final day, when every other school's community is doing the same thing.

The paper says nothing on the ballot page about outside vote services, paid or otherwise, and it does not publish any statement about purchased support for this poll. What it does state is the counting rule and the email exclusion, and any support effort should be measured against those two sentences. For the general legal and rules picture, this guide to the legality of buying votes covers what organizers can and cannot police, and award vote support explains how support for publisher-run award ballots is usually approached.

The honest ceiling on this ballot is community size: one nominee per school means each school's entire community is competing, and the hourly rule rewards organised, repeated participation more than raw numbers on any single day.