Who gets your vote for MLive Bay City Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

An open-sport ballot in the MLive Michigan lineup

Most fan votes in the MLive Michigan lineup announce their subject in the title, but this one does not. The question reads simply, who gets your vote for MLive Bay City Player of the Week, and that open framing is the first thing that separates it from the football-specific ballots the same publisher runs in Ann Arbor, Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo. Because the title names no sport, the newsroom can put any performance it chooses to readers in any given week of the fall window.

The organizer is MLive Bay City, the Bay City, Michigan newsroom. The ballots themselves sit on Crowdsignal, which serves each week's question at its own poll.fm address, and the voting URL points to one ballot page at a time rather than a season hub. Each ballot presents a short list of nominated high school athletes as answer options, and the mechanic is public-vote throughout: the outcome is whatever the clicking audience decides, with no judging panel involved.

One caution shapes the rest of this page. The nominees are high school students, so the page describes the series by publisher, market and format and leaves individual athletes to the ballot itself, where MLive publishes their names each week.

The dated run of the Bay City weekly vote

Six confirmed editions of the series exist: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. That list is the whole published history of the program, and it is what makes the series annual rather than a one-off, since every year in that span has a season of ballots attached to it. Across those six seasons the series produced roughly 49 separate ballots, an average pace of about eight questions per fall, all dated by the polling platform between August and November.

The current voting link illustrates how the series breathes. It serves one specific ballot, marked Poll Closed, from a completed week of the 2025 season. The visible result on that closed ballot shows one nominee well clear of the runner-up, a spread typical of a weekly fan vote where one school community out-mobilizes the others.

What the published material does not carry is the calendar in detail: MLive Bay City has never printed the open and close dates for an individual weekly ballot in advance; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The season-level window of August through November is the reliable fact, and any supporter planning a push around a specific nominee has to watch the link once the fall season begins.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

The action itself is simple. During an open week, the poll.fm page shows one question and a list of answer options, each option naming a nominated athlete alongside the Michigan school the athlete represents. A supporter selects one option and presses the vote control. The page then reveals the running tally, so the result of the week is visible the moment a vote lands.

Several rules a careful supporter would want are simply not part of the published picture. MLive Bay City has not published a voting frequency for the series, and nothing on the ballot states whether repeat votes from one device are filtered. Nomination criteria are likewise kept inside the newsroom; readers vote on the list the editors post rather than nominating their own candidates through a form.

The weekly rhythm matters more here than in a month-long contest. Each ballot lives for a matter of days before it is replaced by the next question, and closed ballots stay reachable at their own poll.fm addresses afterward. That is why the current link shows a finished vote: between seasons, and between weeks, the page a supporter reaches is an archive of a completed round rather than an open vote. Returning to MLive Bay City's coverage at the start of each week of the season is the only dependable way to catch a ballot while it still counts.

Where this ballot sits among its Michigan neighbours

MLive and its partner publishers run a family of Michigan fan votes, and this one reads differently from every sibling. The MLive Bay City-Area High School Football Player of the Week serves the same city but names its sport and runs as a football-only ballot, so the two can be live in Bay City at the same time with different nominee pools.

The wider set includes the Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week, the Flint-Area High School Football Player 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 is tied to its own city's coverage and its own nominee list, so support earned in one market carries no weight toward any other ballot in the group.

One sibling is broader still: the High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week covers the entire state under a single publisher brand rather than a single city. Against that map, the Bay City Player of the Week ballot is the open-format, city-scoped entry: no sport named in the title, a nominee pool drawn from schools around Bay City, and a weekly question that only the local newsroom sets.

Supporting a nominee in a short weekly window

Everything about organizing support here follows from the ballot's shape. A weekly question inside an August to November season gives a nominee's community only days to act, so the useful move is sharing the poll.fm link the moment a new question posts, while the closed ballots that surround it are already out of play. School communities that mobilize early tend to dominate the visible percentages, as the lopsided spread on a recent closed ballot suggests.

Because MLive has published no rules about outside help for this series, no supporter can point to a stated allowance or a stated ban. What is certain is that the organizer controls the outcome display and can present whatever tally its platform reports. For a grounded overview of building support in fan-vote formats like this one, see our guide on getting more votes online, and treat any weekly round as a short sprint rather than a season-long campaign.