Cast your vote for the Journal's Boys Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Journal's boys basketball award is and who runs it

This program is a season-ending reader award for Michigan high school boys basketball. The Journal, the paper named in the program title, organizes the vote, and the balloting runs on the Crowdsignal service. The confirmed ballot address is poll.fm/16787778, and that page carries the full program title in its heading.

The award is decided by public vote: any reader who reaches the ballot page can submit a selection while the window is open. No entry fee and no registration gate appear on the ballot. Nominees on the closing 2026 edition were tied to three Michigan communities, Colon, Mendon and White Pigeon, and those towns anchor the market for the award, since all three are Michigan places.

In the wider field of Michigan school sports polls, this program sits apart from the weekly football honors. Papers such as MLive run week-by-week football ballots for Bay City, Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor carries its own weekly football vote, and High School on SI adds a weekly athlete honor across the whole state. The Journal's award instead crowns a season-long standout for hoops, which makes it a season award rather than a rolling series.

The dated timeline for the Journal's basketball award

The award's timeline shows two confirmed seasons, 2023 and 2026. That pair of years is what marks it as an annual program here, and the recurrence timeline points to 2027 as the expected next edition. No other years are claimed, and nothing on the ballot page extends the list.

The 2026 voting window fell in March, with the timing evidence reading Mar through Mar for that cycle. The poll.fm/16787778 page is now marked closed, and its closing tally is printed on the page itself: 4,555 total votes. The nominee tied to White Pigeon finished at 70 percent on 3,190 votes, the Colon nominee at 18 percent on 808, and the Mendon nominee at 12 percent on 557. Those figures come straight from the closing ballot and are the fullest dated facts this program carries.

What the Journal has not printed is the exact day the ballot opened or closed, and no nomination round dates appear either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No promotion listing exists for this market either, so any platform-side round structure is equally unstated. A reader planning around 2027 therefore has the March placement of 2026 as the only seasonal anchor, with the live poll.fm page as the spot where next dates will surface.

How a supporter votes on the Journal's ballot today

The mechanic behind the Journal's award is a straightforward reader poll run on Crowdsignal. A supporter reaches the poll.fm page, sees the nominee list with each player's community beside it, selects an option and submits. No account creation step appears on the ballot, and no fee is attached. The page then reflects the running tally; that is how the closing 2026 edition came to display its 4,555-vote total with each nominee's share broken out.

The practical catch right now is the closed marker on the 2026 ballot. A closed Crowdsignal poll accepts no selection, so these steps only become actionable once the Journal posts the next edition's page. Because the award ran in 2023 and 2026, and the 2026 window sat in March, the end of basketball season is the natural period to start checking. The paper's sports coverage is the likeliest announcement channel for the new poll.fm address.

Once a live ballot is up, the supporter's job is short: pick a nominee from Colon, Mendon or White Pigeon, submit, and watch the count move. The Journal has printed no rule text about vote caps, daily returns or eligibility on this ballot, so the page's own behavior during an open window is the operative guide for how often a submission counts.

How this award sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan readers have several school sports public votes to follow, and the Journal's hoops award occupies a distinct slot among them. Weekly football honors dominate the sibling set: the Ann Arbor-Area Football Player of the Week, MLive's Bay City-Area and Kalamazoo-Area versions, and the Flint-Area and Jackson-Area ballots, all running week by week during football season. High School on SI adds a Michigan Athlete of the Week across sports.

Against that field, the Journal's award differs on three axes. It covers basketball rather than football. It crowns a season-long standout rather than a weekly honoree, so its window is seasonal rather than rolling. And its market is anchored to the small communities of Colon, Mendon and White Pigeon rather than a metro area, which gives the ballot a genuinely local electorate.

For a supporter, the contrast matters for timing. A weekly football poll rewards a fast push inside a few days; a season award with a March window gives a longer runway but a single closing moment. Readers who follow several of these Michigan programs can compare how each organizer structures its vote by visiting the sibling pages, since each paper sets its own rules on its own ballot.

Strengthening support for a nominee on the Journal's basketball ballot

Because the Journal's award is a single seasonal public vote rather than a weekly series, support-building looks different here than in the football formats. The March window on the 2026 edition gave supporters a defined stretch, and the closing total of 4,555 votes shows the electorate is real but finite. Reaching basketball families across Colon, Mendon and White Pigeon, and asking them to submit before the ballot closes, is the core of any push.

The Journal has printed no rule text on this ballot about outside help, vote software or purchased votes, so the organizer's position on such methods is not on the page. What is on the page is the tally itself, which counts every submitted selection the same way. Supporters weighing options can read our guide to earning wider support online for methods grounded in short-window school polls, and the award votes page for how support is structured on awards of this shape.

Timing is the practical lever. A ballot marked closed accepts nothing, so every effort has to land inside the open window, and the 2026 closing shows the Journal publishes the final split rather than quietly archiving it. Planning the push around the announcement of the next poll.fm address, rather than after it, separates a useful effort from a missed one.