Vote: Who should be The Sporting News Kansas high school player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

A statewide season-closing poll in a market of weekly contests

Most fan votes attached to Kansas high school sport run on a weekly rhythm. The ESPN Wichita High School Athlete of the Week and both Topeka Capital-Journal athlete of the week ballots reset every few days and crown a new honouree each round. This programme works differently. The Sporting News Kansas poses a single question, who should be the state's high school player of the year, and leaves it standing for the length of a cycle before the poll closes for good.

That shape puts it closer to the Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year and the DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year, which are season-ending honours rather than weekly resets. It differs from those two in reach, because the question covers the whole state rather than one metro area, and in platform, because it lives on Crowdsignal's poll.fm rather than a publisher's own contest pages.

The facts at a glance

One more contrast matters. The Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics programme runs as its own separate award operation. This poll is a publisher's editorial question: The Sporting News Kansas decides the nominee list, posts it, and lets readers answer. There is no entry form, no business category structure and no nominating stage printed on the ballot, which makes it one of the simplest ballots in the Kansas set to describe and one of the hardest to campaign for, since everything rides on one closed poll window.

What the calendar shows for this poll

The published history of this programme is short and specific. Two editions are confirmed: one in 2023 and one in 2025. Between those years the poll's address stayed on poll.fm, and the 2025 ballot carries the poll number 16152692, which is the page a supporter reaches at the voting link above today.

The timing that survives for the current cycle is month-level. The 2025 window fell in October, opening and closing within that month. No day-level dates appear anywhere on the ballot page, and the organiser has not printed an open date or a close date for the next edition. Before planning anything around this poll, a supporter should treat those exact boundaries as something to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because the poll number 16152692 is now marked closed, the 2025 edition has ended and no live voting is possible at that address. The page keeps its nominee list and its results in place, which is how the confirmed schools in the nominee roster stay visible after the close. A gap sits beside that history. Neither the ballot page nor any organiser notice spells out how many ballots one supporter may cast, whether nominees must meet an eligibility condition, or what the nomination process for a future list looks like; those points, too, belong to the live page whenever a new cycle appears. Everything else on this page comes from the two confirmed editions and the October 2025 window.

Casting a ballot on poll.fm, step by step

The mechanic a supporter performs is about as plain as a fan vote gets. Crowdsignal presents the question, who should be The Sporting News Kansas high school player of the year, above a vertical list of options. Each option pairs a nominee's first and last name with the school that nominee attends, so a reader from, say, Osage City or Ellsworth can find their local entry by place as easily as by name. There is no login, no email confirmation and no category page to work through before voting.

Selecting one option and pressing the vote control beneath the list is the entire submission. Crowdsignal then swaps the form for a results view, so the supporter sees immediately that the choice registered. Nothing on the ballot indicates a multi-day return requirement, a verification step or a second round, and the organiser publishes no instruction page alongside the poll, so the single-visit shape of the form is the best guide to its use.

Two practical cautions follow from the closed status. First, voting at poll.fm/16152692 today does nothing for any current nominee, because that edition ended with its October 2025 window. Second, when the next edition appears, it will very likely carry a new poll number on the same platform, meaning a bookmark to the old address will keep showing a closed poll rather than the live one. The supporter who wants to participate in the next cycle should reach the ballot through the publisher's own Kansas coverage when a new post goes up, then follow the same select-and-submit sequence on the fresh page.

Where this ballot sits among the Kansas fan votes

Kansas readers who follow high school sport run into several fan votes in a season, and this one is distinguishable from each of them on at least one axis. The two Topeka Capital-Journal programmes, the Athlete of the Week and the High School Athlete of the Week, belong to a single publisher and renew weekly around the capital. The ESPN Wichita ballot does the same for the state's largest metro. Both put a fresh question in front of readers dozens of times a year.

This poll inverts that rhythm. It asks one question once per cycle and lets it run through October, which means a supporter has a single window to mobilise rather than a standing weekly habit. Against the Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year and the DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year, the difference is geography: those honour Wichita and Kansas City basketball respectively, while this ballot spans schools from Shawnee Mission in the northeast to Salina and Ellsworth in the center of the state.

The Catchy Awards programme, at its own page, is the nearest structural neighbour, since both take a statewide view of high school athletics. Even there the contrast holds: the Catchy Awards run as a dedicated awards operation, while this vote is an editorial poll riding on The Sporting News Kansas coverage and Crowdsignal's infrastructure. For a supporter, the takeaway is that strategies built for weekly ballots do not transfer cleanly here. One closed window, one question, and a statewide nominee list reward breadth of reach over repeated visits.

Supporting a nominee in a one-window statewide poll

Campaigning for this ballot is a reach problem, not a repetition problem. Because the form takes a single visit and the window sits inside October, everything a school community can do must happen in that stretch: a coach or athletic department post, a team group chat message, and a share from the nominee's own accounts pointing at the live poll.fm address. The organiser publishes no statement on this ballot about outside help, bought or otherwise, so no organiser rule can be quoted here either way. What can be said is what the form rewards: distinct people reaching the page and submitting once. For a fuller treatment of that problem in public fan votes, including what tends to work and what puts an entry at risk, our votes guide covers the ground without promising any particular outcome.