The Holland Sentinel Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Holland Sentinel Football Player of the Year is and who runs it

The Holland Sentinel Football Player of the Year is a season-ending reader award for high school football in Holland, Michigan. It is run by The Holland Sentinel, a Michigan newspaper whose registry entry lists hollandsentinel.com as its domain. The Sentinel runs its vote through Crowdsignal's poll.fm service, and the live ballot sits at https://poll.fm/15921914 under the title Who will be the Holland Sentinel Football Player of the Year this season?

The program's vertical is sport and its mechanic is a reader vote: the paper publishes a shortlist of nominees and its audience decides the winner on the hosted ballot. The 2025 nominee list draws from West Ottawa and Holland high schools, which makes this a city-level honor tied to the paper's own market rather than a statewide ranking.

For a family group or a school community rallying behind a nominee, the practical picture is narrow. The ballot is a single question with a fixed list of names, the window falls in August, and everything else about the rules sits with the paper rather than on the voting page. The table below collects the facts stated directly on the listing.

The dated record for the Holland Sentinel player of the year ballot

Editions of the Holland Sentinel Football Player of the Year are confirmed in 2023 and 2025. The 2025 ballot ran in August, which makes late summer the month to watch when a new season's poll appears. The paper has not published the precise day the ballot opens or the day it closes, nor any nomination round ahead of voting; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Other facts sit in the same position. The Sentinel has not published a category list, because the award is a single player-of-the-year question rather than a multi-category ballot. No rules text about repeat voting, accounts or eligibility accompanies the poll in any listing connected to it. Promotion or round dates from the platform are likewise absent.

What is confirmed is narrow but usable. The 2025 ballot is live at poll.fm/15921914, and its title asks readers directly who will be the player of the year this season. The span between the 2023 and 2025 edition years marks the program as recurring rather than a single-season experiment. Anyone planning outreach around a nominee should treat August as the likely month and open the live page as the season approaches, because the paper controls when its poll opens and closes.

How a supporter votes in the Holland Sentinel football poll

Casting a vote in the Holland Sentinel football ballot takes a short sequence. Open the ballot at poll.fm/15921914, review the nominee list the paper has placed there, select the player you want to support, and submit. The 2025 ballot listed players from West Ottawa and Holland high schools, so a supporter usually arrives already knowing which school and name they are backing.

The ballot itself is minimal. It carries the question, the nominees and the voting controls, and nothing else in the way of instructions. Questions a supporter might reasonably ask, such as whether a repeat vote is possible later the same day or whether an email address is required, are not answered anywhere on the poll. The Sentinel has printed no per-supporter rule alongside it.

Because the mechanic is a straightforward reader vote with no stated registration step, the practical advice is simple: back your player while the August window is open, and if you want to rally more support, share the ballot link directly with people who already follow Holland-area football. A school community spreading a link it already cares about is the natural fit for a ballot of this shape, since every additional vote has to come from a real person clicking the same poll.

How this ballot sits beside Michigan's other football votes

The Holland Sentinel player of the year ballot sits in a crowded Michigan field of reader-voted football honors, and its neighbours help explain what makes it distinct. MLive runs weekly player of the week votes for the Ann Arbor, Bay City, Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo areas, each resetting through the fall season. High School on SI runs a Michigan athlete of the week vote at the state level. All of these appear alongside it as sibling programs, and each belongs to its own publisher.

The Holland Sentinel award differs from all of them. It is a player of the year honor rather than a weekly series, so it crowns a season rather than a single game. It belongs to a single newspaper's market, Holland, rather than to a metro the size of Ann Arbor or Flint. And it is decided entirely by the paper's readers on the Crowdsignal ballot, with no judging panel named anywhere on the listing.

For comparison among Michigan school-sport votes, the useful distinction is cadence. A weekly MLive market vote gives a nominee a fresh chance every week of the season, while the Holland Sentinel player of the year ballot gives a nominee a single season-ending window in August. Supporters planning outreach should match their effort to the cadence of the ballot they actually care about.

Strengthening support for a Holland Sentinel nominee

Support for a Holland Sentinel nominee grows through the school community the ballot already serves. The 2025 nominees came from West Ottawa and Holland high schools, so every nominee has a built-in audience of classmates, families and local fans who follow that program's games. Sharing the poll.fm ballot link through those channels, while the August window is open, is the move that matches how this vote actually works.

The Sentinel has printed no statement about outside help or vote services on the ballot page, so nobody outside the newsroom can say what the paper's rules on purchased votes are. What is known is the mechanic: real clicks on a hosted poll decide the winner. For a broader playbook on rallying supporters, see our votes guide, and for the legal position on paid votes in reader polls, see our legality page.