Cast your vote for the Journal's preseason boys basketball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Journal's preseason boys basketball honour is

The Journal, a Michigan publisher covering high school sports in the Sturgis, White Pigeon, Bronson, Centreville, Marcellus, Mendon and Three Rivers area, stages a preseason boys basketball honour ahead of each basketball season. The programme asks readers to pick, from a publisher-selected roster of nominees, the player they believe deserves the preseason recognition. It is an award ballot, not a business contest: nobody pays to enter, and the nominees are named individuals from area schools, which is why this page describes the ballot by publisher, sport and town rather than listing players.

The voting itself runs on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm site is the lightweight polling tool many publishers use for reader awards. The confirmed ballot address is poll.fm/14723815, and the 2024 edition at that address is marked closed, which is how Crowdsignal displays a finished poll. The format is a straightforward fan ballot: a reader opens the page, selects a nominee and submits, with no entry fee and no nomination round in front of the selection.

For readers comparing Michigan fan votes, this ballot belongs to the same family as the Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week: a publisher-run award decided by open reader voting rather than by a panel.

The dated record for the Journal's preseason boys basketball vote

Two editions of the Journal's preseason boys basketball honour stand confirmed: 2023 and 2024. Both fell in December, which fits the preseason framing, since the poll runs before the Michigan high school basketball season is under way. The 2024 page at poll.fm/14723815 is marked closed on Crowdsignal, meaning that edition's window has ended and the page now shows final results rather than an open vote.

Beyond those two confirmed years, the publisher has not stated when the next preseason round will run. The Journal has released no precise opening or closing dates for its coming preseason ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Planning around an unreleased date is impossible: a supporter who wants to mobilise a school community cannot schedule against a window the publisher has not announced, and any date quoted from memory of a previous December round would be a guess.

The honest summary is this: the programme has run in December of 2023 and 2024, the most recent edition is closed, and the recurrence pattern beyond that is the publisher's to announce. Watch The Journal's sports coverage as the basketball season approaches, because a publisher-run preseason poll is typically promoted through its own articles and social channels before the ballot goes live. Treat any third-party date list with caution, since the ballot page itself is the only source that reflects the current round.

How a supporter votes in the Journal's preseason poll

The mechanic on the Journal's preseason page is deliberately simple. A reader opens the Crowdsignal address poll.fm/14723815, sees the roster of preseason nominees each shown with his school and town, marks the circle next to the chosen player, and presses the submit control beneath the list. A running tally then appears, letting a supporter track the nominee's standing. No nomination form, no login step and no payment sit in front of the selection on this publisher's poll.

Equally relevant is what the page leaves unsaid. The Journal's preseason page prints no per-reader voting limit and no eligibility text, and the publisher has published no rule set alongside the poll. Whether Crowdsignal applies any repeat-vote control to this specific ballot is not stated by the publisher either. A supporter should therefore assume the ordinary reading: vote as the page allows, and do not build a plan around a loophole the publisher has not endorsed.

Timing matters because the window is short and seasonal. The confirmed runs landed in December, and the 2024 ballot is already closed, so a vote cast today lands nowhere. When the next preseason round opens, the publisher's announcement will carry the live link, and the practical play is to vote early in the window and share the ballot with the nominee's school community while the tally is still moving. Late pushes in a poll that closes without warning rarely catch up.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan has a dense field of publisher-run fan votes, and the Journal's preseason boys basketball honour is unusual among them for two reasons. It is a basketball award rather than a football one, and it is a preseason recognition rather than a weekly series. Most of its neighbours are football player-of-the-week polls that reset every week during the fall season, while this ballot names a single preseason honouree before the winter sport begins.

The sibling programmes on this site show the pattern. The MLive Bay City-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week all run as recurring weekly football ballots from MLive's regional newsrooms. The Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week follows the same weekly shape, and the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week widens the sport to all athletes statewide.

Against that field, the Journal's vote is small and local, drawing nominees from Sturgis, White Pigeon, Bronson, Centreville, Marcellus, Mendon and Three Rivers. That scale changes the arithmetic of winning: a tight school community can move a small poll far more easily than a statewide one, which is why support strategies differ between this ballot and its larger weekly neighbours.

Strengthening support in the Journal's preseason poll

Because the Journal's preseason boys basketball page is small and town-anchored, the support that moves it comes from the nominee's own community. The practical sequence is simple: when the publisher's December window opens, share the poll.fm link directly through the school's parent networks, team group chats and local community pages, and ask each person to vote once and pass it on. A ballot this size rewards a coordinated first-day push far more than a scattered one.

The Journal has printed no policy on outside help or purchased votes for this poll, so nothing on the ballot endorses automation, and a school-level award is the wrong place to test that boundary. For outreach methods that work within a publisher's rules, see how to get more votes online, and for the commercial side of vote packages, the votes service overview and the award-vote page explain what is offered without promising any outcome.