The Post-Standard Syracuse.com High School Winter Sports Game of the Week MVP: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Game of the Week MVP vote is and who runs it

The Post-Standard Syracuse.com High School Winter Sports Game of the Week MVP is a public-vote award tied to high school winter sports coverage in Syracuse, New York. The organizer is The Post-Standard, the Syracuse newspaper whose sports desk publishes on syracuse.com, and the vote is hosted on the Crowdsignal platform at the poll.fm address https://poll.fm/16701369. The ballot asks a single question, exactly as printed: "Who was the syracuse.com high school winter sports Game of the Week MVP?"

The format is a weekly MVP shortlist. During the winter season the publisher names nominees from that week's games and opens a ballot for readers to pick the MVP. Nominees are high school students, so the program is described here by publisher, sport, season and platform, with no individual named. The vertical is sport, and voting is a plain public ballot aimed at the Syracuse high school sports readership that follows syracuse.com through the winter.

The table below collects those fixed details in one place.

One detail the ballot does not carry is how nominees are selected each week or which schools feed the shortlist; the live poll page is the authority for that from week to week.

The dated record: editions, window and what is not published

Two editions of the MVP vote are confirmed, in 2023 and 2025, and that pair of years is the evidence behind the annual label. The 2025 season was documented across sixteen weekly ballots, so within a single winter the vote ran week by week rather than as one season-long poll. Each edition follows the high school winter sports calendar: voting opens in December and closes in February.

What the ballot page does not print matters as much as what it does. Exact dates for opening and closing any weekly MVP ballot, the full list of categories beyond the MVP question, and any rule on how frequently a supporter may vote or who is eligible are all absent from the page The Post-Standard publishes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Because the vote is weekly, the practical date that matters is the current ballot's close, and that is shown on the live poll page for the week in question. The organizer has not published a forward calendar naming upcoming MVP ballots, so readers looking for a specific week's vote should go straight to syracuse.com's high school sports coverage or to the poll.fm link above rather than assuming a schedule.

The confirmed editions sit under The Post-Standard's name with the Crowdsignal ballot as the voting address, and nothing in the confirmed years points to a change of publisher between 2023 and 2025.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

Voting is deliberately simple. A supporter opens https://poll.fm/16701369, finds the MVP question at the head of the page, and sees the shortlist of nominees for the current Game of the Week. Each nominee appears as a selectable option on the Crowdsignal ballot. The supporter selects one option and submits the choice.

Because a new ballot opens for each week's games, the mechanic repeats across the December to February window: check the current week's nominees, pick one, submit. The poll page does not state whether a supporter may vote once per day, once per week, or once per ballot, and no login or registration step is described on the page, so the sensible reading is that the form works as printed and any repeat-vote rule lives with the live ballot.

Supporters who want to follow the series rather than a single week should watch syracuse.com's high school sports coverage, where each weekly MVP question is published alongside the game coverage that produced the nominees. The ballot address keeps the same Crowdsignal poll.fm format from week to week, so once a reader has voted on one MVP question the next week's ballot will feel familiar.

The page states no fee of any kind to take part; casting a vote is open to the public as a reader engagement feature of the newspaper's sports coverage.

Where this ballot sits among New York's high school vote programs

The Game of the Week MVP vote is one of several high school sport ballots run by New York publishers on this site. Its closest neighbours differ by publisher, market and season. The Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week serves Buffalo, the Hudson Valley New York High School Football Player of the Week serves the Hudson Valley, and the lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week and Lohud Girls Basketball Player of the Week serve the lohud market in both boys and girls basketball.

Two statewide football votes round out the set: the New York High School Football Player of the Week and the New York Section 1 High School Football Player of the Week. Each belongs to a different publisher with a separate ballot, so a vote on one never counts toward another.

What makes the Syracuse ballot distinct is the combination of publisher, sport and cadence. It stands apart in the group: The Post-Standard is its publisher, Syracuse is its market, and a weekly winter sports MVP question spanning December through February is its format rather than a football or basketball player of the week. Readers comparing the programs should treat each ballot's own page as the authority for its rules, since the publishers set their own terms.

Strengthening support for a Game of the Week MVP nominee

Support for a nominee on this ballot comes down to reach, and the weekly cadence shapes the work. Because a fresh MVP question opens with each week's games, a push has a short runway: share the current poll.fm link while the week's ballot is open, and aim it at the school community, teammates' families and local followers who actually watched the game. A weekly format rewards early sharing, since a nominee who trails on day one has the rest of the week to close the gap.

The Post-Standard publishes no statement on this ballot about outside voting help, so anyone considering paid support should first read the organizer's terms on the live page and see our votes guide for methods that do not depend on any single ballot's rules. For readers weighing a purchase, the award votes page explains how packages are priced for ballots of this kind.