The Sporting News Kansas High School Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Sporting News Kansas player of the year vote is

This program is a high school sport ballot covering the state of Kansas, run by The Sporting News Kansas under the name The Sporting News Kansas High School Player of the Year. The publisher puts a single question to its readers: who should be the Kansas high school player of the year. No slate of categories exists, no nomination round appears on the page and no second ballot follows, just one question and one list of nominees.

Voting is hosted on Crowdsignal, which serves the ballot through poll.fm, and the ballot for the most recent confirmed edition sits at poll.fm/16152692. That 2025 poll is now marked closed, so a visitor arriving today sees the final state of the vote rather than an open form. Voting itself is a plain public vote: a supporter who reaches the page reads the nominee list and casts a vote, with no login gate stated on the ballot itself.

The nominee list on the 2025 edition drew from high school programs across Kansas, including entries out of Tecumseh, Osage City, Ellsworth, Salina and the Shawnee Mission area. That spread is the single most useful fact for anyone planning around this ballot. The vote is statewide, so support for any one nominee has to be mobilized across a whole school community and its wider network, not just a single town. The table below pulls the fixed facts together.

The dated facts behind this Kansas player of the year ballot

The confirmed years for this program are 2023 and 2025. That two-year history is what qualifies the player of the year vote as an annual program rather than a one-off poll, and it sets the expectation that a further edition follows in 2026. No year between those two is claimed, and no year beyond them is claimed either.

The 2025 window fell in October, with the ballot opening and closing inside that month. That is the only timing fact the program's own evidence supports: no opening day, no closing hour and no nomination period are printed anywhere for this ballot. The Sporting News Kansas has not published the opening and closing dates of its player of the year vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Three further gaps follow from the same source. The publisher has printed no category list, which fits the format, since the ballot is one question rather than a multi-category readers choice. No per-supporter vote cap, daily return rule or eligibility text is published for this program. And no round dates, such as a semifinal cut or a finalist stage, are published for the Crowdsignal ballot, so any assumption about rounds would be an assumption, not a fact.

For planning purposes the honest summary is this: expect a fall window, expect a single-question ballot on poll.fm, and treat October as the month to be ready for. Everything more specific than that belongs to the live edition.

How a supporter votes in the Sporting News Kansas poll

The mechanic, taken literally, is short: open the ballot at poll.fm/16152692, read the question and the nominee list, select the player you want, and submit. The Crowdsignal ballot logs the selection at once and displays the running tally, which is why late movement in these polls is visible to everyone watching the page.

Two practical points shape the experience. First, there is no stated account requirement: the 2025 edition presented the question and the list directly, and nothing on the page asked a supporter to sign in before voting. Second, the ballot is one question wide. A supporter casts a vote for a player of the year and is done, with no second category to fill and no write-in step described on the page.

The state of the ballot matters as much as the mechanic. The 2025 poll is closed, so anyone following a voting link today lands on a finished result. That is normal between editions: the program ran in 2023 and again in 2025, and the next ballot is expected with the fall 2026 cycle. When it goes live, the same three actions apply, open the page, read the nominees, vote.

What a supporter cannot read off the page is the rule layer. Whether the organizer limits repeat votes, whether votes from the same network are weighed, and whether any eligibility condition applies to nominees are all unstated. Those are organizer choices, and this ballot does not publish them.

How this ballot sits beside its Kansas neighbours

Kansas has a busy high school sport ballot scene, and this program is distinct within it in three ways. It is statewide rather than city-anchored, it is an annual player award rather than a weekly honour, and it is run by a national sports publisher's Kansas operation rather than a local chamber or banquet committee.

The nearest neighbours in format are the weekly votes. The ESPN Wichita High School Athlete of the Week and the two Topeka Capital-Journal athlete of the week ballots, the general edition and the high school edition, all reset on a short cycle and name a new field each week. This program names one field for the year and closes with a single winner.

The award-style neighbours are the Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year, the DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year and the Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics ballot. Those are tied to a banquet, a city or a specific sport. The Sporting News Kansas ballot is none of those: one question, the whole state, every sport the publisher chooses to include, on Crowdsignal.

For a nominee's supporters the difference is practical. A weekly vote rewards a campaign that can repeat itself every seven days; a player of the year vote rewards one concentrated push inside a single October window.

Strengthening support before the October window

The shape of this ballot dictates the shape of a campaign. Because the confirmed window is October and the ballot is a single question, the useful work happens before and during that month: identify the nominee's natural base, the school, its families, its alumni and its local businesses, and give each group the direct link to the poll.fm ballot rather than a chain of shares.

Because the publisher prints no vote-cap or eligibility rule for this program, nobody outside the organizer can state what a safe volume of repeat voting looks like. The defensible position is to rally real supporters and let each of them vote as the ballot allows, rather than assume a rule that is not published. A nominee whose support appears padded with irregular activity draws the publisher's attention, and the publisher's rules here are unstated, which cuts both ways.

Timing is the other lever. The 2025 edition opened and closed inside October, so a campaign that starts gathering its list in September, with the link ready and the ask written, enters the window without losing its first days to setup. The get more votes online guide covers the general tactics; applied here, they all reduce to one thing, reaching the Kansas school communities that actually care about the award while the poll is open.