The Holland Sentinel Girls Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Holland Sentinel Girls Athlete of the Year is

A reader who wants to back a local girls high school athlete in Holland, Michigan runs into one immediate gap: The Holland Sentinel does not print a rules page for this award. There is no published nomination form, no eligibility criteria, and no statement of who may vote or how often. That gap is exactly where most confusion starts, because supporters assume a newspaper award must come with the same paperwork a chamber award or a national contest carries. It does not. The ballot page is the whole framework: one question, one list of athletes, one voting control.

What is firmly established is the program's identity. The organizer is The Holland Sentinel, the daily newspaper covering Holland and the Lakeshore area of Michigan. The vertical is high school girls sports, and the format is a single girls athlete of the year ballot rather than a weekly player-of-the-week series. The vote is hosted on Crowdsignal, at the poll.fm page numbered 17130812, and the newspaper directs readers to cast ballots through its own sports coverage on hollandsentinel.com.

The nominees on the ballot come from the area's high schools, and the page pairs each athlete with her school so readers know exactly who they are supporting. Because those nominees can be minors, this reference page does not name any individual athlete, coach or student; the live ballot is where the roster belongs.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: editions, the June window and what is unpublished

The series is old by local award standards. The Sentinel's own recap of area female athletes traces the girls athlete recognition back to 2001, and a companion piece notes the long-running series ran from 2001 through 2022. On the live ballot side, confirmed Crowdsignal editions exist for 2023, 2025 and 2026. The voting month for the 2025 and 2026 ballots is June on both ends, which makes early summer the reliable season to watch for this award.

Everything with a date that matters sits in those three points: a 2001 origin, ballots confirmed in 2023, 2025 and 2026, and a June window. Beyond that, the organizer's published footprint is thin. No open or close day is printed, no nomination deadline exists, and the 2027 edition has not been announced. The Sentinel has not published a nomination round or a per-reader vote limit for the girls athlete ballot, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That thinness has a practical consequence for supporters. A supporter who waits for a printed calendar will wait past the window, because June passes without an announcement of the precise days. The safer habit is to check the ballot URL and the Sentinel's high school girls sports coverage at the start of June each year, and to treat the poll page's own status line as the authoritative signal of whether voting is open.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot today

The mechanic is deliberately simple, which is typical of a newspaper's Crowdsignal ballot. A supporter opens poll.fm/17130812, sees a single question asking who was the Holland Sentinel Girls Athlete of the Year, and a list of candidates each shown with her high school. Selecting one candidate and submitting the form is the entire act of voting. No registration step is presented on the ballot, and no payment or code is required.

After submission, the poll page displays the running answers: each candidate's percentage and raw vote count, updated as ballots land. This makes the Holland award unusually transparent for a local poll, since a supporter can watch the June field move in real time. The page also keeps those answers visible after the poll closes, so the finished tally becomes a lasting public tally of the season's recognition.

Two mechanics are not documented anywhere the organizer publishes. The first is whether a reader may return daily; the second is whether device-level limits exist. Because the Sentinel prints no rules text on the ballot and no separate terms page exists for the award, a supporter should read the live page's own instructions rather than assume a pattern from other Michigan polls. The June window is the other practical anchor: ballots confirmed for 2025 and 2026 both fell inside that month, so submissions belong there.

How this ballot sits beside other Michigan athlete votes

Michigan readers meet a lot of high school vote programs, and the Holland Sentinel's girls award is easy to distinguish from its neighbors. It is a year-end honor for one girls athlete, not a weekly honor, and it answers to a single newspaper rather than a statewide outlet. The neighboring programs on this site are weekly player-of-the-week ballots: the Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the MLive Bay City-Area vote at bay city, and the Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week.

The same weekly pattern continues with High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week, the Jackson-Area High School Football Player of the Week, and the MLive Kalamazoo-Area High School Football Player of the Week. Each of those runs on its own publisher's schedule, usually weekly during a football season, while the Holland award concentrates its public vote into June.

That June concentration changes strategy. A weekly ballot gives a nominee fifty-two chances a year and rewards steady, small pushes; a year-end girls athlete ballot gives the Holland area one window, and the 2025 and 2026 editions both placed it in June. Support has to be organized before that month starts, because there is no next week inside the same cycle to make up ground the way a football weekly allows.

Strengthening support for a Holland Sentinel nominee

Because this ballot is a single June window rather than a rolling weekly vote, the useful work happens before and during that month. The award's audience is the Holland area school community, so the natural base is the nominee's own school: classmates, families, alumni groups and the school's sports social accounts. The Sentinel itself invites readers to vote in its story on hollandsentinel.com, which means sharing the story link is an organizer-endorsed path to the ballot.

The organizer's published stance is thin on outside help: no rule text addresses purchased votes for the girls athlete ballot. What is knowable is the format. Votes land on a Crowdsignal page that shows a live percentage and total, so sudden irregular jumps are visible to everyone watching the field, and a publisher can moderate its own award at its discretion.

For a supporter weighing options, the honest framing is that this award's rules are unpublished and the June window is short. Anyone comparing support methods should start with the general votes guide and the pricing context at award-vote support, and should read the live ballot's own wording before acting, since that page is the only rules source the organizer provides for the Holland award.