Vote for the Capital-Journal's player of the year for boys basketball: How Voting Works & How to Win

A fan vote built for Kansas high school basketball readers

Who actually votes here, and why does the ballot exist? This program is a public fan vote aimed at supporters of Topeka area high school basketball in Kansas, deciding the Capital-Journal's player of the year honor for the boys season. Its home is Crowdsignal's poll.fm service, at the confirmed voting address poll.fm/15208700, which is this ballot's own page rather than a platform landing page. The published details list the Arizona Daily Star as the named organizer while the program carries the Capital-Journal brand, a pairing printed on the ballot itself.

The vertical is sport, the contest type is an award decided by public vote, and the audience is whoever follows the high school basketball beat the newspaper publishes: families, classmates and booster communities around the nominated schools. These details are collected in the table below.

Everything a supporter needs sits on that single ballot page: the nominated players, their schools, and the running tally. The newspaper's role is to publish the nominations; Crowdsignal's role is to host the form and count the submissions. No separate registration site, entry portal or app is part of this program as printed.

The dated story of this player of the year ballot

Which editions are confirmed, and when does the vote run? The program's confirmed years are 2022 and 2025, and two edition years are enough to mark the poll as annual rather than a single-season event. The 2025 edition's voting window fell in March, with both the start and the finish of that window landing in the same month. The newspaper prints no day-level opening or closing dates anywhere; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The 2025 ballot itself carries the clearest dated evidence: it displays as closed, and its final tally showed the Washburn Rural nominee holding 78 percent of the 8,456 votes recorded. That figure is printed on the poll page and is the only published vote total for this program.

Equally concrete is the list of gaps. There is no category roster beyond the one player question, no printed per-supporter vote cap, no eligibility text, and no schedule of platform rounds for future editions. No promotion entry exists for this market on the platform side either. Each of those gaps means a supporter cannot plan around a rule the newspaper has not written down, and the live form is the one place any of it would surface once an edition opens.

Whether the 2026 edition follows the March pattern is unstated. The two confirmed years are the whole recurrence evidence.

How a supporter votes on the Crowdsignal ballot

What does a vote actually require? The mechanic is the simplest shape a public poll can take. The supporter opens the poll.fm address, sees the list of nominated players paired with their Topeka area schools, selects one option and submits the form. Crowdsignal then shows the running percentage beside each nominee, which is how the ballot displayed the Washburn Rural lead during its most recent edition. No account creation, no email verification and no write-in step appear anywhere on the ballot page.

The current state matters as much as the mechanic. The 2025 ballot displays as closed, so a visit today shows a finished result rather than a live form. That means the literal action a supporter can perform right now is reading the outcome, and the voting action returns only when the newspaper posts a fresh ballot for the next edition. Because no advance schedule of window dates exists, the poll.fm address is the single point of truth for whether voting is open.

Nominees on the most recent ballot came from Rossville, Topeka West, Silver Lake, Washburn Rural, Highland Park and Shawnee Heights. A new edition would carry its own nomination list, since the newspaper selects the players it covers rather than accepting open entries through the form.

Where this ballot sits among Kansas public votes

How does this poll differ from its neighbours? Kansas carries a cluster of public vote programs, and this one is distinguished by its narrow focus: a single award, boys basketball, decided once the high school season ends. The closest relative in the same publisher family is the Topeka Capital-Journal Athlete of the Week, which recurs on a weekly cycle rather than a season-ending one, and the Topeka Capital-Journal High School Athlete of the Week alongside it.

Outside Topeka, the state offers the Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics, the ESPN Wichita High School Athlete of the Week, the Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year, and the DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year, which is the other basketball-specific vote in the group. The DiRenna award shares this poll's sport but sits in a different market, so a supporter's votes in one carry no weight in the other.

What makes this ballot distinct within that set is the host: it is the sole member of the group confirmed on Crowdsignal's poll.fm service at this address, and the only one whose most recent window is pinned to March. For supporters, the practical difference is timing: weekly polls reward constant attention, while this one rewards showing up once the nomination list posts.

Strengthening support while the window is open

How does a nominee's corner actually move the number? Because the ballot is a plain Crowdsignal form with a percentage tally, momentum comes from getting the poll.fm link in front of people who care about the school: team group chats, booster pages, class years and the neighbourhood around the gym. The tally updating in real time is the poll's own feature, and it is visible to every visitor, so an early push compounds as supporters see their school pulling ahead.

No printed statement from the organizer addresses outside vote help for this poll, which means no one but the newspaper can say where the line sits. The votes guide covers organic outreach patterns that work on public ballots of this shape, and the general service background lives on the award votes page. Whatever route a supporter takes, the honest baseline is the same: the poll counts what it counts, the newspaper publishes the result, and the tally on the ballot page is the only scoreboard this program has ever shown.