The Holland-Area Girls Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Holland Sentinel's player of the year vote is

The practical problem for any Holland-area basketball family in December is that the award everyone is talking about has almost no published paperwork. There is no entry form to study and no rules page to quote, because the Holland Sentinel runs this program the way most newsroom reader awards run: as a single ballot page, hosted on Crowdsignal at poll.fm, that carries everything a supporter needs in one place.

That page is the whole program. The Holland Sentinel, the daily newspaper for Holland, Michigan, owns the award, chooses the nominees and publishes the result. The platform, poll.fm, only carries the vote. The ballot is a plain public fan vote for high school girls basketball, and the current edition lists nominees drawn from the schools that make up the Holland-area basketball scene: West Ottawa, Holland, Zeeland East, Zeeland West, Hamilton and Saugatuck all appear among the options.

For a supporter, the useful consequence is that nothing stands between the decision and the vote. There is no registration gate described on the ballot, no separate nomination round to wait for and no second platform to join. The trade-off is that the ballot is also the only source of rules. Whatever the Sentinel has decided about eligibility, vote frequency or the closing moment lives on that page or in its sports coverage, not in a standalone policy document.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: editions, window and what is not published

Two editions of this Holland Sentinel honor are confirmed: 2022 and 2025. Both belong to the winter high school basketball calendar, and the voting window in each case falls in December, opening and closing within that month. The Sentinel ties the poll to the season rather than to a fixed calendar date, which is why the month is the reliable unit here and the day is not.

That gap is the single most common question supporters ask. The exact voting and nomination window dates, the list of ballot categories beyond the player of the year honor itself, and any vote cap, daily return rule or eligibility restriction are not printed with the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The Sentinel announces each edition through its sports coverage when the poll goes live, and that announcement is where the closing date, if the paper states one, will appear.

The two-year spread also matters for expectations. A poll confirmed in 2022 and again in 2025 is a recurring feature of the Sentinel's winter coverage rather than a single experiment, but the paper has not published a formal schedule promising a 2026 edition. Treat each winter's ballot as confirmed only when the Sentinel's own channels announce it, and treat the poll.fm address as the place the live window is finally visible.

How a supporter votes in the Holland-area poll today

The voting action takes seconds, and that simplicity is exactly why mobilizing a school community works here. A supporter opens the Holland Sentinel's ballot at poll.fm/16377900, reads the nominee list, selects the radio button beside her chosen player and submits. The nominees are presented by name and school, so a West Ottawa or Holland backer can find her player without navigating a bracket or a multi-category form.

Nothing on the ballot describes a login, a verification step or a nomination form, and the Sentinel has not published a separate rules page alongside the poll. That means the supporter's entire job is the selection and the submit action, repeated as often as the live ballot permits. If the paper has set a once-per-day instruction or a closing timestamp for the current season, that instruction sits on the ballot page itself, so read it before organizing anyone.

Two practical notes follow from this shape. First, because the ballot is a single Crowdsignal page, the link a supporter shares is the vote itself; there is no landing article a voter must pass through, so every message should carry the poll.fm address directly. Second, the nominee roster is season-specific. The players listed on the 2025 ballot belong to that season's class, and a new winter brings a new roster drawn from the same Holland-area schools, so last season's link may show a different list or a closed poll.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

This Holland Sentinel award is one of several Michigan high school fan ballots of a similar shape, and the differences between them are worth understanding before a supporter treats advice from one as advice for all. The Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week runs on a weekly cycle during football season, while the MLive Bay City-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week belong to the MLive group's weekly rhythm.

The Holland award differs in cadence and in scope. It is a player of the year honor rather than a weekly honor, it belongs to girls basketball rather than football, and it is anchored to a single publisher's coverage area around Holland rather than to a rotating slate of weekly nominees. The Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week round out the state's set, each answering to its own publisher.

What this means in practice is that rules do not transfer. A weekly football poll's reset rhythm, its nominee rotation and its publisher's stated vote rules say nothing about how the Sentinel handles its December basketball ballot. The Holland Sentinel is the only authority for this award, and its ballot page is the only text that governs it.

Strengthening support in the Holland Sentinel poll

Because the ballot is a single public page, effective support in this program looks like organized repetition inside the Holland-area school community. The athletic department's accounts, the team's parent group chats and the players' own networks are the channels that actually move a poll like this, and each message should carry the poll.fm address and the nominee's name and school so nobody lands on the wrong player.

The Sentinel prints no policy on outside help, vote purchasing or automation alongside this ballot, so the safe position is the conservative one: a push that reads as genuine community support, coordinated openly by people connected to the school, carries none of the risk that a publisher judging a push as manipulation would create. Where a paper suspects automated or coordinated voting, the usual remedy is discounting or removing votes, and a nominee can lose the honor entirely. That consequence is set by the Sentinel, not by the platform.

If a family is weighing paid support, the honest first step is reading the live ballot for whatever rules the Sentinel has posted this season, then reading buying award votes for how these markets work generally. No service, ours included, promises a win in a publisher-run award, and the Sentinel's judgment about its own poll is final.