The Elmira-Corning Region Football Preseason Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Star-Gazette preseason player of the year poll is

Most fan-voted high school honors in New York run week after week during the season, resetting with a fresh slate of nominees each time. This ballot works differently. The Star-Gazette, the newspaper whose masthead covers New York's Elmira-Corning region, asks its readers a single preseason question: who is the region's football player of the year heading into the season? A single title, a single question, a single vote, placed before the first kickoff rather than after each Friday night.

The mechanics are plain. Crowdsignal, the balloting platform behind the poll.fm address, carries the Star-Gazette's question, and the confirmed series address is poll.fm/15981640. Taking part means picking from the nominee list on the ballot, which any supporter may do. The publisher's page adds a short prompt asking readers to give others the chance to vote, which tells you the Star-Gazette wants the result spread by sharing rather than confined to its own subscribers.

The nominees themselves come from high school football programs across the region. The 2025 ballot carried players connected with Elmira, Corning, Horseheads, Waverly and Watkins Glen/Odessa-Montour, which gives a sense of the geographic spread the newspaper draws on. Because those nominees are minors, this page deliberately names only the towns and programs, never the individual athletes.

The facts below sum up the program as it stands.

Edition years and the September voting window

The Star-Gazette's series has two confirmed years behind it, 2024 and 2025. Both fell in September, which fits the preseason framing in the title, since readers are asked to name a preseason player of the year before any result can settle the argument. The 2025 edition ran under the headline asking who the Elmira-Corning region's 2025 football preseason player of the year was, and that ballot now displays as closed.

What the Star-Gazette has not printed is any precise calendar. No open date, no close date, and no nomination round are shown on the published page for either edition, and the publisher has not posted a schedule announcing when the next round begins. The same page is silent on a per-supporter vote limit and on any eligibility rule for who may take part; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The two-year pattern still says something useful. A preseason poll that has now run in consecutive Septembers has a settled slot in the newspaper's sports calendar, and 2026 is the next year a ballot would be expected. Readers planning to support a nominee should treat late summer as the period to watch, because a preseason title is decided before the season can change anyone's mind.

One more dated detail is worth separating from the rest. The closed status on the 2025 ballot is a fact about that edition only. It does not mean the series has ended, and it does not carry any information about when the 2026 question will appear. The publisher's own page gives no forward date, so the fullest honest summary is a September habit with no printed dates attached.

How to vote in the Elmira-Corning region football poll

Voting in this poll is about as simple as a public ballot gets. When the Star-Gazette's September round is live, the Crowdsignal page at poll.fm/15981640 shows the question and the nominee list side by side. Each nominee is presented as a player paired with his program, so a supporter from Horseheads or Waverly can scan the list and find the athlete connected to their own sideline. The supporter marks the choice beside that nominee and sends the selection in with the submit control, and the page confirms it.

Two practical points follow from the published page. First, no registration step is described anywhere on it: the ballot shows nothing asking a supporter to create a Crowdsignal account or to sign in with the newspaper first, so the ballot works as an open vote. Second, the publisher's own text ends with an invitation to give others the chance to vote, which is the organizer explicitly encouraging supporters to circulate the link rather than vote once and stop.

Frequency is the one point the ballot page leaves open. No printed rule says whether a supporter may return the next day, whether votes are capped per person, or whether the platform applies any limit of its own. A supporter who wants to vote repeatedly should simply follow whatever the live ballot permits on each visit, since that is the only rule the organizer has actually published for this series.

Compared with the weekly siblings, the calendar carries extra weight in this series. A preseason award is decided before games are played, so the window is short and sits in September. A supporter who waits for the season to start has already missed the question the ballot asks.

How this poll sits beside other New York high school ballots

New York has a crowded field of fan-voted high school honors, and most of the ones covered alongside this one run on a weekly rhythm. The Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week resets every week across its own coverage area, and the New York High School Football Player of the Week does the same at statewide scale. The lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the Lohud Girls Basketball Player of the Week follow the weekly pattern in basketball, while the New York Section 1 High School Football Player of the Week and the Hudson Valley New York High School Football Player of the Week apply it to football in the lower Hudson Valley.

Against that backdrop, the Star-Gazette's ballot differs on three axes. It is annual rather than weekly, with editions in 2024 and 2025 instead of a fresh question every seven days. It is preseason rather than in-season, asking readers to judge before any game is played. And it is regional rather than statewide, drawing its nominees from the Elmira-Corning area of southern New York rather than from a metropolitan or statewide roster.

Those differences change how a supporter should think about the vote. A weekly athlete ballot rewards fast mobilization inside a window that repeats all season, so a slow start costs little. A single preseason title offers no second chance: if a nominee's supporters miss the September window, the question is settled for that year. It also means the nominee pool is smaller and more local, so a concentrated community push travels further here than it would on a statewide ballot carrying a long nominee list.

For supporters tracking several New York ballots at once, the practical takeaway is that this one demands attention before the season, while the weekly siblings demand attention during it.

Supporting a nominee in the Star-Gazette's preseason poll

Because this is a preseason title with a short September window, support for a nominee has to be organized quickly. The Star-Gazette's own closing line, asking readers to give others the chance to vote, points at the method the newspaper expects: circulating the poll.fm address through team group chats, booster club pages, family networks and local community groups while the ballot is open. A nominee's strongest asset in a regional poll is a school community that knows the ballot exists.

On outside help, paid or otherwise, the Star-Gazette has published nothing for this series, so there is no stated policy to quote either way. What is certain is the format: an open Crowdsignal ballot where every submitted selection counts toward the total. Supporters weighing paid participation can read this guide to strengthening a public-vote campaign before deciding anything, and should weigh it against whatever the live ballot permits.

The one timing rule worth repeating is the calendar itself. Preseason means before the games, so the window closes early, and a campaign that starts after the first Friday night is already late.