The Holland Sentinel Top Performer of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

A weekly school sports poll, not a metro best-of ballot

Most ballots in this Michigan collection ask readers to choose a favorite business, venue or act across a whole city or region, and they stay open for weeks at a stretch. The Holland Sentinel Top Performer of the Week works differently on every axis. It is a weekly poll, it covers high school athletics rather than businesses or music, and it is run by a single local newspaper rather than a chamber of commerce or an events group.

The organizer is The Holland Sentinel, the daily newspaper serving Holland, Michigan, whose masthead sits at hollandsentinel.com. The paper posts the question "Who was the Holland Sentinel top performer of the week?" and lets readers answer it directly. The vote itself is hosted at poll.fm on Crowdsignal, and the current ballot lives at poll.fm/16387513. Each week's poll names several nominees, each tied to a sport and a school program, with wrestling and basketball among the sports that have appeared on recent slates.

That shape puts this program in the best-of vertical by mechanics rather than by subject: a public vote, an open ballot, a winner decided purely by reader clicks. The table below lists the fixed facts.

Seasons, the school-year window and what the paper has not printed

Two seasons of this poll are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. The Holland Sentinel runs the series annually, and the pattern of those two years points to a further season in 2026, though the paper has not yet printed dates for it. Because the program is a weekly series rather than a single long ballot, a "season" here means a run of weekly polls rather than one continuous voting period.

The overall window follows the Michigan high school sports calendar, running from October into May. Within that window, each individual poll is short: the ballot stays open until noon Friday, after which the paper closes that week's vote and moves to the next slate of nominees. The day each new poll is posted, and the dates it opens and closes, are not printed in advance on the ballot page.

The Sentinel also leaves several structural questions off the page. The ballot does not print a roster of which sports or athlete categories qualify in a given week, and no rule about repeat voting by one supporter appears there either; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. For a weekly series this matters more than usual, since a fresh ballot every week means the rules you checked last week may not describe this week's poll.

How a supporter votes on the current poll.fm ballot

The mechanic is as plain as public voting gets. A supporter goes to the week's poll on poll.fm, reads the question and the list of nominees, selects the radio button next to one name, and presses the vote button. The page then shows the running tally for that week. No nomination form sits in front of the vote: the Sentinel's sports staff puts up the slate, and readers only choose among the published nominees.

Results on past ballots show how decisive a weekly audience can be. On one 2025 season ballot, the leading nominee held 88 percent of the vote on a tally of 913 votes, while a trailing nominee held 4 percent. A margin like that in a poll that closes at noon Friday means the outcome is usually settled by which school community mobilizes early in the week, not by a late surge.

Because each week is a separate poll, a supporter who misses the Friday noon cutoff does not lose a long-running campaign; the next week's ballot arrives with a fresh slate. The practical rhythm is therefore weekly: check the Sentinel's high school sports coverage, open the current poll.fm link, vote, and return before the next Friday noon close if the ballot allows repeat participation.

Where this poll sits among Michigan's reader-vote programs

Michigan readers who follow public-vote contests have several very different options, and this poll is the most local and the fastest-cycling of them. The Detroit News Readers' Choice and the DN Readers Choice Awards are big-city business ballots, the Detroit Community Choice Awards and the Grand Rapids Magazine Best of GR cover metro markets, the Detroit Music Awards honor acts rather than athletes, and the Best of Northern Michigan spans a whole region.

The Holland Sentinel Top Performer of the Week differs from every one of those in three ways. Its market is a single newspaper town, Holland, Michigan, rather than a metro or a region. Its subject is high school athletes, so the nominees are weekly individuals rather than year-round businesses. And its cadence is weekly inside an October to May season, so a supporter gets dozens of fresh chances per season instead of one annual window.

For a Holland-area family, that means the practical advice differs too. A business competing in a metro best-of ballot plans around a months-long campaign, while a family supporting a wrestler or basketball player here works in seven-day bursts, with the Friday noon close as the only deadline that matters each week.

Supporting a nominee in a poll that closes Friday at noon

A weekly ballot rewards speed over scale. Because each Holland Sentinel poll closes at noon Friday, the useful window is roughly the first half of the week, and the most effective move is the simplest one: put the poll.fm link where your school's community already gathers, whether that is a team group chat, a parent email list or the athletic department's social accounts, and ask once early rather than repeatedly late.

Keep the ask honest. The ballot simply counts reader clicks, and the Sentinel decides its top performer from whatever readers genuinely cast, so outreach that recruits real supporters beats any shortcut. The organizer leaves its position on outside vote help unprinted for this poll, which is one more reason to treat the Friday noon deadline and genuine outreach as the whole game. Our guide to getting more votes online covers outreach that fits a weekly high school poll like this one, and the legality overview explains where purchased votes stand with contest organizers generally.