Early Season Early Softball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Early Season softball ballot is and who runs it

A nomination to an early-season player of the year ballot creates a problem immediately: the window is short by design, and this program gives supporters nothing printed to plan around. Before any of that matters, though, it helps to know exactly what the ballot is. The program is the Early Season Early Softball Player of the Year, a Kansas high school softball award decided entirely by public fan vote. The organizer of the program is listed as Early Season, and the balloting lives on the poll.fm ballot service run by Crowdsignal, at the poll numbered 16881961.

This is a sport award, and the shape of it is a public vote: whoever reaches the ballot can select from the published nominee list and submit a choice. The nominees are early-season softball players, each shown on the ballot alongside her school community, with communities such as Gardner and Murdock appearing among the entries. That pairing of player and community is the whole visible structure of the ballot; the organizer publishes nothing further about how nominees are chosen or how the winner is honoured once voting closes.

For a nominated player's family, the practical takeaway is that this is a turnout contest. The ballot rewards whichever community delivers the most supporters to the poll.fm page during the live window, and nothing on the ballot suggests any judging panel or secondary criteria. The table underneath pulls the fixed facts together.

The dated facts: which editions ran and when the window falls

Two edition years stand confirmed for this program, 2023 and 2026. Those two runs are what qualify the program as annual. The 2026 cycle is the newest one known, and its window fell in April, an April-to-April span that fits an early-season softball schedule where the first weeks of the spring season generate the nominees. Following that pattern, a 2027 edition is what a reasonable supporter would expect, though the organizer publishes no forward calendar saying so.

What the published facts leave out matters as much for planning. The organizer has not printed the exact day the April window opens or closes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No category list appears on the ballot page either, beyond the nominee roster itself, so any division of the award into subgroups is unknown. The organizer also publishes nothing about a per-supporter cap, nothing about daily returns, and no eligibility text describing who may vote or how nominees qualify. No nomination round or platform round dates are published anywhere for this market.

For a supporter, the consequence is simple: the only dated fact to work with is April in an edition year. Everything else about timing must be taken from the live poll.fm page while the ballot is actually up, which is why checking the ballot early in the month is the only dependable habit.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot today

What a supporter actually does here is deliberately plain. The ballot sits at poll.fm/16881961 under the title Vote for the Early Season Softball Player of the Year. Opening it shows the nominee list: each entry pairs a player with her school community, so a supporter from Gardner, Murdock, or any other community on the list can find the relevant entry by town as easily as by name. The poll presents these as selectable choices in the standard Crowdsignal format.

Voting is then a matter of selecting the intended nominee and submitting. No account step, no fee, and no registration appears on the ballot; the public-vote format means the choice is open to whoever reaches the page while the poll is live. Once submitted, the service registers the selection and the page confirms it in the browser.

Two practical cautions follow from what the ballot does not say. Because no closing date is printed, a supporter who intends to vote should do so as soon as they learn of the nomination rather than waiting for a deadline that is never announced. And because no repeat-vote rule is published, anyone planning to return and vote again should read whatever the live page states about duplicate submissions at that moment. On both points the live ballot is the final word, and it can change between the 2023 and 2026 style editions without notice.

How this ballot sits beside its Kansas neighbours

Kansas has a crowded field of high school sports fan votes, and this softball ballot is distinct from all of them. The Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics program runs a broader athletics award, while the ESPN Wichita High School Athlete of the Week and the two Topeka Capital-Journal weekly programs, the Athlete of the Week and the High School Athlete of the Week, are media-run weekly series tied to newsroom publication schedules.

Two more neighbours are seasonal honours rather than weekly polls: the Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year and the DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year, the latter confined to basketball in the Kansas City market. Every one of those has a separate organizer and a separate calendar, and support built for any of them carries no weight here.

What separates this program is its narrowness and its timing. It covers a single sport, softball, and a single moment in that sport's calendar, the early season, with the confirmed 2026 window sitting in April. The organizer is the program itself rather than a newspaper or a banquet foundation, and the host is Crowdsignal rather than a media platform. A softball family in Kansas therefore has a ballot dedicated to exactly their sport and their moment, which is why turnout in a short April window decides it.

Strengthening support in a short April window

Because this ballot is a plain public selection with no printed closing date, the strongest organic move is speed: get the poll.fm link to her school community the moment the nomination is known, since the window can close without warning. The ballot's own structure favours broad, simple turnout, teammates, families, and local softball groups all casting a selection, over any complicated repeat-voting scheme, especially with nothing published about whether a supporter may come back and vote again.

The organizer publishes nothing about outside help, paid or otherwise, for this ballot, so anyone weighing that route has only the platform's general terms and the live page to go on. Whatever the decision, it should be made against the actual rules shown on the ballot, not against assumptions. The tactics that fit short fan-vote windows like this are laid out in our votes guide.