Northeast Indiana Boys Basketball FAN CHOICE Performance of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

The one thing most voters get wrong about this poll

Most people who find this poll expect it to work like an SI fan vote — click your player, come back tomorrow, click again. It does not. Outside the Huddle runs the FAN CHOICE Boys Hoops Performance of the Week on Google Forms, and Google Forms records one response per session. That is the single most important fact about this ballot, and it changes everything about how a campaign should be run.

On an uncapped poll, having two committed supporters who vote fifty times each moves the needle. Here, those same two people produce two votes. What moves the needle is finding fifty different people who each vote once. Reach, not repetition. That is not a limitation so much as a different kind of contest — one where community size and organizational speed matter more than any individual's patience.

The second thing voters miss is the close time. Tuesday at 5 p.m., not midnight. Anyone who plans to push the link Tuesday evening has already missed the window. In practice, the viable campaign runs Sunday through Tuesday noon — and Tuesday morning is where the last real votes come in.

What the confirmed winners reveal about the competitive field

Four different programs produced confirmed FAN CHOICE winners in the 2025-26 season: Blackhawk Christian (Bryce Lacross, week of March 3–7), Columbia City (Landon Richmond), Bishop Dwenger (George Poiry), and Bishop Luers (Zen Szaferski).

Read those four names as a map. Three are Fort Wayne-area programs — Dwenger and Luers are diocesan Catholic schools on the city's north and south sides; Blackhawk Christian is an independent evangelical school in Fort Wayne. Columbia City sits 25 miles west in Whitley County, the Eagles a program that regularly draws deep into the NIC conference standings. None of them is a 6A enrollment giant. All four have something the Google Forms mechanic rewards: a connected, identifiable community that can be reached through one or two group chats.

Bishop Dwenger and Bishop Luers share something else worth noting. Both draw from the same Fort Wayne Catholic alumni network — families with kids at one school often have history at the other, and their boosters overlap with Blackhawk Christian's evangelical community in a city where private- school basketball is genuinely followed. When either program has a nominee, they are not just reaching current families. They are reaching the broader diocesan and religious-school community across Allen County. That is a real structural advantage in a poll this size.

Columbia City's win is the different case. Whitley County is farm country, with a tight local identity built around the Eagles. A Whitley County basketball campaign runs through the same channels as everything else in that community — the local Facebook group, the booster app, the school's own social accounts — because there is one community and it is not fragmented. Smaller in absolute terms. Faster to organize.

How the nomination process actually works

Outside the Huddle selects the weekly field from stat lines submitted by coaches to [email protected]. The form does not open until the nominees are set — which means a game that goes unreported never appears on the ballot, no matter how good the performance was.

That makes the nomination step more important here than on polls where editors scrape box scores independently. A coach who submits a strong game with the full stat line, the opponent, and the final score — by Saturday night or Sunday morning — gives the editorial team what it needs before the week's form is finalized. A great game submitted Monday afternoon is almost certainly too late.

Once the form goes live (typically Sunday), the article on outsidethehuddle.net carries the Google Forms link embedded in the body. The hub at outsidethehuddle.net/tag/fan-vote/ collects every week's post for boys hoops, girls hoops, and football — so if you land on the site mid-week, sorting by that tag gets you to the right article fast. Clicking an older article's form link takes you to a closed form with no redirect; check the article date before you submit.

For more on how regional Indiana fan polls work, the state guide at /usa/indiana/ covers the full picture, and the national directory at /usa/ indexes all tracked weekly contests. The how-to guide walks through the weekly fan-vote cadence if you're new to this type of campaign. If you're running a broader effort, vote-support campaigns designed for regional weekly polls are also worth knowing about before Tuesday noon.