Wichita Small School Preseason Defensive Lineman of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Wichita Small School Preseason Defensive Lineman of the Year?

The Wichita Small School Preseason Defensive Lineman of the Year is a July fan award for Kansas high-school football, settled by public vote rather than by a coaches' panel or a media ranking. Its scope is deliberately narrow: a single position, the defensive line, drawn from small-school programs whose communities sit across the state rather than inside a single large district.

Visit Wichita is credited as presenting sponsor directly in the ballot title. The publishing outlet behind the series is not named on the poll page itself, so the organizer's fuller identity is something a reader picks up wherever a new edition is announced.

Crowdsignal carries the small-school lineman ballot at https://poll.fm/11158386, the address every edition of this series has used. Every answer on it pairs a nominee with the community his program represents, and the town names appearing among the options include Kingman, Hutchinson, Newton, Maize, Oxford and Caldwell. The slate is rebuilt for each preseason edition, so the lineup that counts is always the single one printed on the active poll.

Which editions have run, and what does the July window look like?

This poll has more history than most single-position ballots. Confirmed editions ran in 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026, which sets an annual cadence around the high-school offseason.

The window is compact. Both the opening and the closing of the cycle fall inside July, so the whole preseason vote plays out within a few weeks. The most recent ballot, poll 11158386, carried the closing line "Poll ends 7/21" in its title and now shows a closed status, meaning that edition's tally is settled.

What the title does not settle is the start. Neither an opening day nor any nomination round is printed beside that closing line; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The fine print is equally sparse. The ballot states nothing about repeat voting, account requirements or nominee eligibility, so a supporter working the edges of the rules has nothing written to lean on.

Because the cadence is annual, a program that misses the July stretch waits a full year for the next slate, which makes the printed closing line the single date worth watching.

How does a supporter actually cast a vote?

The mechanics take only moments. A supporter opens https://poll.fm/11158386 in any browser, where a "VOTE NOW!" banner sits over a plain answer list. Each line names a defensive lineman and the community his program represents, so scanning for a familiar town is usually quicker than reading every entry.

Selecting an answer marks the choice, and submitting it adds to that nominee's total. No fee screen and no registration step interrupts the path from arrival to a counted selection, and a phone browser handles the page as smoothly as a desktop, which matters because much of the sharing around a small-school nominee travels by text message and social feed.

Once the July close passes, the ballot flips to its closed state and the answer list remains on display as that edition's final lineup. Anyone arriving late sees the outcome instead of a live form, so visiting inside the window is the difference between shaping the result and merely reading it.

For anyone planning a push, the practical summary is brief: the form is open, the choices are clearly labeled, and the closing line in the title is the constraint that actually binds.

How does this ballot compare with other Kansas fan votes?

Kansas readers meet plenty of public ballots, and this single-position contest stands apart in several ways. It honors a single football position instead of spreading across many categories, which concentrates the whole electorate on a single head-to-head field. It targets small-school programs, giving smaller communities a stage that metro-wide rounds rarely provide. And its July slot lands in the preseason lull, before fall coverage fills the calendar.

The nearest neighbor by market is Best of Wichita, yet even that citywide round differs sharply in breadth from a preseason honor confined to a single defensive role. The other Kansas ballots on this site, listed below, each cover a broader consumer or community agenda:

Read together, the table shows why this poll occupies its own niche: every sibling aggregates many interests across a place, while this ballot drills into a lone role on defense for a specific class of program.

How can a nominee's backers make the short July window count?

A window this tight rewards preparation over improvisation. Sharing the ballot address, https://poll.fm/11158386, directly with people who already follow the school beats hoping they find it on their own, since every extra hop between a supporter and the form costs votes. Reminders carry the most weight in the final days before the printed close, which fell on 7/21 for the latest edition.

Because the poll states no outside-help policy, a campaign should treat the ballot's own instructions as the complete rulebook and stay inside them. The get-more-votes guide gathers outreach patterns that suit short-window public polls like this July lineman vote, and none of them replace the basic job of putting the link in front of the right community early.