Who should be the N.J. Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What this ballot is and who stands behind it

This award asks New Jersey readers one question at the end of the high school football season: which player deserves the year's top honor. The ballot is hosted on Crowdsignal, which serves it through its poll.fm address at https://poll.fm/16358997, and the organizer is named there only as N.J., with no fuller publisher name given on the ballot page. The program is a sport-vertical award: readers pick a player rather than a business, and the winner is decided entirely by the public vote total. Unlike a weekly honor that resets every few days, this ballot asks a single question about a whole season and closes once the answer is settled.

The market is statewide. Nothing on the ballot ties the award to a single town, county or conference, and the nominees come from high school programs across New Jersey, identified by school, class year and position. The table below collects the fixed details in a single place. Everything else a supporter might want, from the exact calendar to the fine print, lives on the ballot itself, which is why this page points readers there. The program also sits alongside the sibling New Jersey fan votes described later on this page, all public votes but on different schedules and different publishers.

The dated facts for this award

The dated facts for this award are short and specific. Three editions are on the books: 2022, 2023 and 2025, which qualifies the program as annual, and the recurrence pattern points to a next expected edition in 2026. Voting falls in November and December of each edition year, so the ballot is a late-season fixture that wraps up near the end of the high school football calendar. The 2025 edition has finished: the ballot title reads Who should be the 2025 N.J. Football Player of the Year? (Poll Closed), and the tally shown there gave the leading nominee 81 percent of the votes, with the runner-up at 5 percent.

What the ballot does not print matters just as much for anyone planning a push. No printed opening or closing date exists for any edition, no nomination round is dated, and the page sets out no per-person limit or eligibility terms; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No dated platform promotion rounds exist for this market either. Since the window is anchored to November and December, anyone hoping to take part should begin checking the ballot as the season winds down rather than waiting for an announcement. None of these gaps change the core shape of the award: one question, a public vote, a final result per edition.

How a supporter votes today

Voting takes little effort. The ballot sits at the poll.fm address https://poll.fm/16358997, where the question and the full slate of candidates appear together. Every candidate is identified by school, class year and position or position pair, which lets a voter recognize a player even without photographs. Choosing one means clicking that nominee's radio button and submitting the form, and the running percentage beside each name updates on the same page. With one question and a fixed slate of choices, casting a ballot takes less than a minute from start to finish.

Right now the action is paused: the 2025 poll is closed, so submitting a choice is not possible until the next edition posts. When a new ballot goes live, the same steps apply with a fresh slate of candidates for that season. The page displays the question exactly as the organizer wrote it, so there is no ambiguity about which award a vote supports. The mechanics match the wider poll.fm family of fan votes, which keeps the learning curve flat for anyone who has backed a New Jersey athlete of the week ballot before. Anyone planning to vote on several days should follow whatever instructions the live form shows, since each poll.fm ballot sets its own patterns.

How this ballot sits beside its New Jersey neighbours

New Jersey readers have no shortage of fan votes, and this page links every sibling so the differences are easy to see. The Asbury Park Press High School Athlete of the Week and the New Jersey High School Football Player of the Week rotate nominees on a weekly rhythm during the season. The Courier-Post South Jersey Girls Basketball Player of the Week covers a different sport and gender, and the New Jersey High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week does the same for winter sports. The Jersey Sports Zone Football Game Ball is a football vote tied to single games, while the NJ MileSplit Boys Performer of the Week reaches track and field.

Set against that field, this ballot differs on three axes. It is annual rather than weekly, so a supporter gets a single chance per season instead of a fresh ballot every few days. Its question spans an entire season, crowning a player of the year rather than honoring a single performance. And its nominee list is fixed for the edition, where a weekly honor refreshes its candidates each cycle. For a reader deciding where to direct support, the weekly siblings reward season-long engagement while this award concentrates everything into a single late-year vote.

Strengthening support in this poll

Support in this poll works differently from a weekly ballot, since the window is brief and the result is final. A serious push is built around direct asks: teammates, classmates, local youth football families and the program's social media pages, each pointed at the poll.fm address with the nominee's name and school so nobody selects the wrong line. Coordinating a concentrated effort inside the November to December window beats scattering asks across a season whose exact dates are not announced. For tactics that carry over to any public fan vote, see our votes guide at how to get more votes online. Nothing on the ballot addresses outside help, so the safe position is to keep every ask personal and person-to-person rather than automated.