Win D2 D2 Player of the Year in Michigan: How Voting Works & How to Win

A statewide Division 2 fan vote run by Win D2

Who actually decides this award? The short answer is anyone in Michigan who finds the ballot. Win D2 runs the programme as a public fan vote, which means no panel of coaches or sportswriters picks the Division 2 Player of the Year. The community does, one selection at a time, on a ballot hosted by Crowdsignal at the poll.fm address poll.fm/17343986.

That community is broad. The nominee list in the most recent edition reached from Grand Rapids Catholic Central in the west to Tecumseh in the southeast, with Lake Fenton, Kingsley, Parma Western and Notre Dame Prep in between, plus programmes out of Vicksburg, Portland, Fremont, Richmond and Lansing. School communities mobilising behind their own player are the engine of the whole exercise, and the near-tie in the final tally showed how hard those pushes pull.

The shape of the ballot is deliberately simple. It asks a single question, who will win D2 Player of the Year in Michigan, and offers a roster of nominees as the answer set. There is no bracket, no nomination round printed on the page and no secondary category. A supporter arrives, reads the list, picks and submits.

The dated record for this ballot

The confirmed run of editions is 2023, 2025 and 2026, and the programme counts as annual because of those years, with the next edition expected in 2027. The 2024 calendar year is simply absent from the confirmed list, so treat the series as recurring rather than unbroken.

The voting window falls in July and August on the platform's calendar, but the ballot itself runs longer than that stretch. The 2025 edition is the clearest dated fact on the page: its poll closed on December 12 at 11:59 p.m. ET, a date Win D2 let stand well past the summer start. When the 2026 edition launched, the same pattern of a long, open-ended voting stretch carried over.

The final standings from that 2025 edition underline how contested the award is. The leading finalists finished level at 33 percent of the vote, with a third programme well behind, so the outcome was decided by whichever school community turned out hardest in the closing days.

What Win D2 has not published is the fine print. The organizer has printed no category roster beyond the single question, no rule on how often one person may vote and no eligibility condition for nominees or voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes today

The mechanic is the plainest part of the programme. A supporter opens the Crowdsignal page, which loads with the question about the D2 Player of the Year and the nominee list directly beneath it. Every option pairs a player with the Michigan school the athlete represents, so a voter from Grand Rapids, Lansing or any of the smaller towns on the roster can find the local name in seconds.

Selecting an option highlights it, and submitting locks the choice into the running tally. The platform displays live percentages beside each nominee while the poll remains open, which is exactly how the 33 percent deadlock at the close of the 2025 edition became visible to everyone following along. That transparency is part of why the fan vote carries weight with the school communities.

Nothing on the ballot requires an account, an email confirmation or a login step, so the whole action takes under a minute. Whether the platform accepts repeat selections from the same supporter is a rule Win D2 has chosen not to print, and the organizer's silence there means the live page is the only authority. If a future edition adds a nomination stage or a second question, that change will appear on the ballot itself rather than in any advance notice.

Where this ballot sits among Michigan's player-of-the-week contests

The Win D2 poll is unusual in this market because it crowns a full season award for a single division, while most of its neighbours run weekly recognition tied to a publication's coverage area. The Ann Arbor-Area High School Football Player of the Week and the Flint-Area High School Football Player of the Week both reset every week of the season, which gives them a fast cadence and a different kind of campaign.

MLive operates two of those weekly series, one for the Bay City area and another for Kalamazoo, each anchored to its own coverage region. The High School on SI Michigan Athlete of the Week spans sports rather than football alone, and the Jackson-Area Player of the Week serves its own corner of the state.

Against that field, the Win D2 ballot is the division-wide season-capstone vote: one question, one division, one award, and a window that stretches from midsummer into December. A supporter following several of these programmes will notice the Crowdsignal platform under more than one of them, but the rules, the rosters and the closing dates answer to each organizer separately.

Strengthening support for a Division 2 nominee

Every campaign for this ballot runs through the same narrow door: the poll.fm page and its visible tally. Because the percentages sit beside each nominee, a school community can watch its position move in real time, which makes coordination far more effective than on ballots where results stay hidden. The 2025 edition's level finish at 33 percent is proof that organised turnout, not a single viral moment, decided the award.

Win D2 has published no statement on outside help, paid or otherwise, for this poll, so the organizer's silence leaves the Crowdsignal page as the only rulebook. Anything a supporter plans should survive a read of that page first. For outreach that works with a single-question ballot of this shape, see how to get more votes online, and for the standing question of whether purchased support is ever appropriate, the legality overview lays out the general position. No service, ours included, can promise the outcome of a fan vote this tight.