Your Pick for Lohud Readers Choice Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the lohud Readers Choice football player of the year poll is

This program is a single-question fan ballot titled "Who's your pick for lohud Readers Choice Football Player of the Year?" It sits inside the lohud Readers Choice family, a readers-vote format in which the audience, not a panel, decides the winner. The vertical is high school sport, and the market is New York State, with the ballot drawing its nominees from football programs around the state.

The balloting host is Crowdsignal, reached through its poll.fm domain. That matters for a practical reason: a Crowdsignal poll is one question, one list of options, one submit action. There is no multi-category ballot here, no nomination form to fill and no bracket to follow. Everything a supporter does happens on the page at poll.fm/14793117, which is the only ballot address attached to this program.

The nominee list on the confirmed edition pairs each player with the school he represents, drawing entries from football programs across the state. The ballot displays results openly, so the standings are readable after the poll closes rather than hidden until an announcement. That combination, an open tally on a single-question poll, is the shape to keep in mind when comparing this vote with the weekly honours that run alongside it in the same state.

Dated facts: December editions and what the ballot does not say

This poll has two confirmed editions, in 2023 and 2024. Both are anchored to December, which fits the rhythm of high school football: the season concludes in late autumn, and a player-of-the-year readers vote lands immediately after. December is the only month the evidence supports; the ballot page prints no day-level open or close date for either edition, so the start and finish of the 2024 window cannot be pinned down from the ballot itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The 2024 poll closed and now presents itself as a closed poll with final standings attached. The tally placed the leading nominee at 53 percent and the next finisher at 42 percent, a margin wide enough that the outcome was settled well before the page locked. Names and schools are printed beside those percentages on the ballot, and this page deliberately leaves them there rather than restating them.

Three things the ballot page does not publish deserve plain mention. It carries no rules text on repeat voting or on who is eligible to be nominated. It carries no announcement of a 2025 edition or any later return. And it carries no nomination-round dates, so there is no published basis for saying when nominees were set. Anyone planning around a future edition needs the poll link itself, because the ballot page is where a new window would first appear.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

The mechanic is as plain as a fan vote gets. The path starts at the poll.fm address: read the question and the nominee list, select the radio control beside one nominee, and submit. While the poll is open, that is the entire transaction. No account creation is described on the ballot, no category selection precedes the pick, and no second stage follows the submit.

When the poll has closed, as the 2024 edition has, the same address still works but the behavior changes: the page presents the final standings and accepts no further picks. A supporter landing on a closed poll is seeing history, not a live vote, and the standings shown there are the organizer's own published result.

For a live edition, the practical path for a campaign is to route every potential voter to the exact ballot address rather than through a search. Because Crowdsignal presents the full nominee list on one screen, a short ask naming the nominee and school performs better than a long explanation; the supporter needs to find one line and click it. Sharing the link while the December window is open is the only timing that counts, and the page itself is the only signal that the window has shut. Nothing about the mechanic rewards delay: a pick submitted during the open window is the only one that registers toward the published tally.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

New York hosts many fan-voted high school sport ballots, and this one is distinguishable by cadence and scope. Most of its neighbours are weekly awards; this is a seasonal, once-a-season player-of-the-year vote. The New York High School Football Player of the Week and the New York Section 1 High School Football Player of the Week both reset their ballots every week during the season, while this poll crowns one player for the whole year.

The same publisher family runs parallel basketball votes: the lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the lohud Girls Basketball Player of the Week. Those are winter-season weekly ballots, separate programmes with their own pages, and backing a player in one has no bearing on the other. Further afield, the Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week covers a different media market entirely, and the Hudson Valley High School Football Player of the Week narrows to a regional football weekly.

What makes this ballot different is therefore the December, end-of-season frame and the single-question Crowdsignal format. Anyone weighing where to spend effort should note that a weekly ballot offers many small windows while this one offers a single decisive window, and the siblings above each carry their own rules on their own pages.

Strengthening support in a single-window December poll

Because this poll opens and closes inside one December window with no published daily-vote rule on the ballot page, the useful moves are timing and reach, not repetition. A nominee's camp does best when the ballot link circulates where New York high school football families already look: team group chats, booster posts and the school's own channels. The ask should name the player and school exactly as the ballot does, so a supporter matches the list instantly.

The organizer publishes no statement on this ballot page about outside assistance or purchased support, and no eligibility or conduct text appears on it. That silence is not permission, merely an unpublished area of the rules, and anyone considering paid support should read the award-votes page plus the organizer's terms where they exist. What the ballot's facts do support is the ordinary path: one submitted pick per visitor through the poll.fm page, gathered while the window is open. A poll that shows a live percentage tally rewards early and broad sharing, because every percentage point printed on the page is itself persuasion for the next visitor.