Vote for the Times Herald Prep Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Times Herald Prep Football Player of the Week poll is

Each week of the Michigan high school football season, The Times Herald, the daily newspaper based in Port Huron, invites its readers to pick a prep football player of the week through a public vote. The paper's sports desk collects nominations, assembles a short list of nominees, and posts a ballot where anyone can vote for their pick. The voting page sits on the Crowdsignal service, whose public polls live at poll.fm, rather than on the newspaper's own site.

The nominees are high school football players from schools across the paper's coverage area in Michigan's Thumb and Blue Water region. Weekly ballots have included players from Port Huron, Marysville, Richmond, Sandusky and Almont, among other communities, with each nominee listed alongside their school and position.

Because this page describes a poll of high school athletes, the nominees are minors, and no individual player is named on this page. The program itself, however, is straightforward to describe: it is a reader-driven recognition series, the kind of weekly honor a Michigan high school football family or a local business supporting a nominee often wants to rally votes around.

The key facts at a glance:

The weekly schedule and the seasons on the record

The poll runs on a fixed weekly rhythm during the Michigan high school football season. Player nominations are accepted by 10 p.m. on Sunday, the new ballot then carries that week's nominees, and voting closes at noon on Friday. The Times Herald states on its own coverage that you can vote multiple times, so the whole window from Monday's posting to the Friday noon close is open for repeat voting.

Confirmed seasons cover 2023, 2024 and 2025, drawn from a series of weekly ballots published between September and October of those years. The poll has not published a fixed posting hour for each Monday's new ballot, so anyone timing a push around the fresh ballot should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Each round's nomination deadline and Friday close, by contrast, are printed on the paper's coverage in plain terms.

Once a weekly poll closes, the page remains live with the final standings visible. A closed ballot shows every nominee's share of the vote and the raw count beside their name, which makes the outcome transparent to anyone who voted in the round.

For a school community, the practical takeaway is the calendar. Nominations land on Sunday night, the voting window runs the first part of the week, and the Friday noon close is the hard stop. Planning a get-out-the-vote effort around those three anchors, rather than around guesswork, is the difference between a coordinated push and a scatter of last-minute votes.

How a supporter votes in the current weekly poll

Voting takes place on the Crowdsignal ballot, reached either through the poll link in the Times Herald's high school football coverage or directly at poll.fm. The linked ballot is the latest poll in the series; each week of the season posts a new poll at its own address, so a supporter should confirm they are on the current round and not a closed one.

The mechanic is simple. The ballot lists each nominee with their school and position beside a radio button. A supporter picks their player and submits the form. The Times Herald states that you can vote multiple times, and the poll does not require an account, a login or a verified email to cast a vote.

Because the paper invites repeat voting, a nominee's supporters can return to the ballot more than once before the round closes. Voting ends at noon on Friday, so votes cast after that point belong to no one, and a poll left open in a browser tab past the close will not count toward the finished round.

Supporters who want a player considered for a future poll have a separate action. The paper asks readers to submit entries by 10 p.m. on Sunday, which feeds the next week's nominee list. That makes Sunday night the pivot point of the whole cycle: nominations close, the new ballot goes up, and the following five days of voting decide the week's honor. For a family or booster group organizing around a player, the two actions, nominating and voting, sit on opposite ends of that weekly window.

How this poll sits beside other Michigan player of the week ballots

The Times Herald poll is one of several weekly high school football recognition ballots across Michigan, and each answers to its own publisher and coverage area. MLive runs parallel player of the week polls for the Bay City area, the Flint area and the Kalamazoo area. The Ann Arbor area has its own ballot, and the Jackson area another, while High School on SI runs a Michigan athlete of the week poll with a wider net than football alone.

What distinguishes the Times Herald entry is its market and its host. It serves the Port Huron area and Michigan's Thumb communities, a coverage area the other publishers do not touch, and it builds its ballots on Crowdsignal at poll.fm rather than on its own publishing platform. The paper's stated rule, that supporters can vote multiple times, is also the operative fact for anyone comparing these ballots, since per-voter rules differ from publisher to publisher and only the ballot in front of you can settle what applies.

For a nominee in the Blue Water region, this poll is the local honor with the newspaper's own sports coverage behind it, and the weekly Friday results give it a fast, visible cadence. A player in another part of the state belongs to a different paper's ballot entirely, and votes cast on the wrong market's poll carry no weight toward any other.