Who is the preseason Herald-Times boys basketball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why this Indiana basketball poll exists

The preseason boys basketball player of the year question is The Herald-Times asking its own audience to weigh in before the season starts. The Herald-Times is an Indiana newspaper whose coverage home is heraldtimesonline.com, and its sports desk uses reader polls as a standing way to let the community, not the newsroom, decide honours of this kind. The audience is the paper's readership across its Indiana coverage area, and the subject is high school boys basketball in the weeks before games begin.

The ballot itself lives on Crowdsignal, reached through poll.fm, a polling platform that hosts question-and-answer votes for publishers of every size. The mechanics are deliberately plain: a list of candidates, a set of radio buttons, a submit button, and a live share of the vote that updates as submissions land. There is no entry form, no judging panel, and no fee. The publisher supplies the candidate list drawn from the schools it covers, and the crowd supplies the result.

That shape matters to anyone following the poll. Because the vote is public and unlogged, a candidate's standing depends on how many people a family, a school community, or a fan base can rally to the page while the window is open. The table below lists the program's fixed details.

The dated facts: editions, the November window, and what is unpublished

This poll has confirmed runs in 2022 and 2024. That pair of years is why this reference treats the program as annual, and it is also the honest limit of what can be said about its history. No edition years before 2022 or between 2022 and 2024 are published anywhere the program itself controls, and the publisher has not said which year the next edition falls in, so the calendar for the current cycle has to come from the paper's own sports coverage.

The voting window falls in November in the cycles published so far, which fits the preseason framing: the poll runs while the basketball season is still ahead of the players. The ballot page carries the closing phrase "until noon on Friday, July 10", and the publisher's own article behind the poll stated that "Readers may vote as much as they like in our latest poll until it closes on Friday, July 10 at noon." Those sentences come from the cycle that produced the current ballot, and they are the only clock the publisher has printed for this program. No exact opening day for any cycle appears in published material.

The publisher has also not printed a category list or a per-reader rule set for this ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The hosted page for the 2024 edition is labelled closed, so its result is settled and any new voting belongs to the next edition's address.

How a supporter votes today, step by step

The mechanic is the simplest kind in public voting. A supporter opens the ballot address, poll.fm/14693295, in a browser on a phone or a computer. The page loads directly: no account, no email, no sign-in with a social platform. The question sits at the top, the candidate list runs beneath it with each player named beside his school, and a vote button sits at the bottom.

Selecting a candidate and pressing the button registers the choice immediately. Crowdsignal then refreshes the page to show the split of votes, which is how the 2024 ballot came to display a leading share of 54% while voting was underway. Because the running total is visible, supporters can see a race tighten in real time, and that visibility is a large part of why these polls spread so quickly through school communities once someone shares the link.

The publisher's stated rule for its polls removes the usual limit question: readers may vote as much as they like until the closing moment arrives. That is The Herald-Times speaking about its own polls in its own article, not a claim about any outside service. The ballot carries no printed statement about automated voting tools or about support gathered off the page, and nothing in the program's published material addresses either. The practical sequence, then, is open the page, pick, submit, and repeat only while the ballot is live, because a closed ballot accepts nothing further.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana's other reader votes

The Herald-Times is not alone in running this kind of ballot, and the closest neighbours are worth knowing because they are easy to confuse with it. The paper's own Bloomington Herald-Times Athlete of the Week repeats through the sports calendar and honours a fresh performance every cycle, while the preseason player of the year question is asked once, before the basketball season, about a season-long honour. The Evansville paper runs a parallel football honour in the Evansville Courier & Press Football Player of the Year.

Statewide programs sit alongside these as well. The Indiana SI Boys Basketball Player of the Year covers the same sport at state level, the Indiana High School Football Player of the Week works a weekly rhythm in football, and the Indiana SI Football 3A and 4A Player of the Year ballots split football honours by class.

What makes this program distinct is the combination of publisher and timing: a single Indiana newspaper, a boys basketball question asked before the season, and a November window. A supporter planning a campaign should always confirm which of these ballots they are actually looking at, because the names are similar and the calendars are not.

Rallying support in this poll without tripping its rules

This ballot rewards ordinary community turnout. The publisher's own words allow unlimited repeat voting until closing time, so the strongest honest move is a reminder routine: share the ballot link with the school's parent groups, ask coaches to post it, and send a final push the morning of the closing deadline, since noon closings catch people who plan to vote later. Because the running share is visible on the page, a school community can see whether its effort is working and adjust. The ballot publishes no statement on automated support or outside vote sources, so a campaign that wants to go beyond hand-reminders should read the ground rules first at get more votes online and judge the publisher's silence carefully rather than assuming permission.