Citizen Times End of Regular Baseball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The program, the organizer and the ballot

The Citizen Times End of Regular Baseball Player of the Year honors the high school baseball player whom readers select at the close of the regular season. The Citizen-Times, the newspaper behind the award, publishes the ballot on Crowdsignal, the polling service whose ballots appear at poll.fm addresses. Readers choose among nominated players, and the player who gathers the most support is named the reader's selection for the season.

The ballot lives at the Crowdsignal page for this award. That address is the voting destination itself, not a general homepage, so typing it directly lands a supporter on the active poll. When an edition is open, the page presents the roster of nominees as selectable answers with a submission button beneath them. When an edition has finished, the same address shows a closed notice.

The award sits inside North Carolina, where The Citizen-Times covers high school baseball. The state is the geographic frame stated with confidence here; the paper's specific coverage communities are not itemized, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle for the schools represented on any given roster.

Because the nominees are high school students, this reference deliberately avoids naming any individual player. The award is described by its publisher, its sport, its season and its state, which is everything a supporter needs in order to find the ballot and participate.

Who votes and why the community shows up

This is a community poll in the plainest sense. The people who vote are the people who followed the regular season: teammates who shared a dugout with the nominees, classmates who sat in the stands, parents and relatives who drove to every away game, coaches who scouted the opposition, and local readers of The Citizen-Times who track high school baseball the way other towns track college programs. A season-end ballot gives all of them a single moment to weigh in on which player defined the spring.

The motivation differs from a business contest, where a shop rallies customers for marketing value. Here the stakes are pride and recognition. A nomination tells a player that the paper noticed his regular season. A wave of votes tells him the community noticed too. That is why these polls can move fast in their final hours, when a school's whole fan base discovers the ballot and pushes for its own.

The end of regular season framing matters for who appears. The award honors the body of work built across the season schedule, not a single standout game and not a playoff run. Nominees are drawn from the coverage The Citizen-Times performed during the spring, and the roster on the live ballot reflects that season's story. The organizer keeps the category count and the per-voter rule off the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

North Carolina runs several reader-driven high school honors alongside this award. Weekly programs like the Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week and the Greensboro News & Record Player of the Week recognize performances as the season unfolds, while this poll waits for the regular season to end and crowns a single overall selection. Supporters who enjoy voting through the year can participate in both formats.

For players and their families, the poll is also a visibility exercise. A strong finish puts a name in front of the paper's sports audience at the exact moment season summaries are being written. For younger players, it can carry into the following season's expectations. None of that requires anything beyond genuine support from people who actually watched the games.

Editions, timing and the May window

Confirmed editions of this poll ran in 2022 and 2025. Those are the years established as fact here, and together they support describing the award as an annual tradition tied to the spring high school baseball calendar. The gap between the confirmed years is not evidence the award skipped seasons; it only means the years in between are not independently established, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle for the current season's status.

Voting takes place in May. That timing follows the sport itself: the high school baseball regular season concludes in late spring, and the paper publishes its season-end ballot once the schedule wraps and before playoff attention takes over. A supporter planning to participate should treat May as the month to watch, with the live Crowdsignal page as the source of truth for the precise opening and closing moments.

What the confirmed years do not supply is a day-level calendar. No opening date and no closing date are published for any edition, and no platform promotion schedule exists for this market. The exact voting window for the next edition, expected around 2026, is not announced in advance; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The single-ballot format shapes how supporters should time their push. With no nomination round preceding it, the roster is set when the poll goes live, and the entire contest is a sprint inside May. A community that discovers the ballot late has little runway, which is why sharing the link early in the window matters. The closed notice that appears afterward is the only formal end signal the platform provides.

Readers comparing schedules across the state's honors will find a similar May rhythm elsewhere. The Charlotte Observer Boys High School Athlete of the Week and the Charlotte Observer Girls High School Athlete of the Week run on weekly cycles during their seasons, while season-end awards like this poll compress everything into a short spring window. Knowing which format you are entering tells you whether to vote weekly or to save the push for May.

Rules, limits and what the organizer does not publish

The rules picture for this poll is thin by design of the format. Crowdsignal ballots are lightweight: a question, a list of answers, a submission button. The Citizen-Times does not publish a rules page alongside the ballot, and no eligibility text, no vote cap and no per-day limit appears with it. The organizer keeps the category count and the per-voter rule off the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

For a supporter, that gap has practical consequences. You cannot assume repeat voting is blocked, and you cannot assume it is permitted. Crowdsignal gives poll creators tools to discourage repeat submissions, but whether the creator of this ballot enabled any of them is not stated anywhere the organizer publishes. The safe posture is a single honest vote per person, with the live page as the reference if it displays any restriction notice.

Eligibility for nominees is likewise unstated in formal terms. Informally, the roster is drawn from high school players within the paper's North Carolina coverage, nominated by the sports staff for their regular season performance. Whether the paper accepts write-in candidates, public nominations or coach submissions is not published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the organizer does control is the outcome's integrity. A newspaper award carries the paper's name, so a result that looks engineered reflects badly on the publication. Organizers of reader polls routinely strike votes that arrive in implausible patterns, and a ballot can be voided or restarted when irregularities are obvious. Nothing published about this specific poll states its enforcement procedure, so treat that as general practice rather than a documented rule for this award.

This is also why outside vote buying sits on shaky ground even where no explicit rule addresses it. The organizer's silence on caps is not permission; it is an absence of information. A community that wants its player to win does better with a broad, human push, and supporters looking for structured tactics can start with our guide to getting more votes online. The Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week page covers similar ground for a weekly honor in the same state.

Supporting a nominee honestly and the buying question

The legitimate playbook for this poll is short and effective. Find the ballot early in May. Vote. Then share the link with people who genuinely follow the team: players' families, classmates, youth league alumni, local fans who attend games. A message that names the player and explains why his regular season earned recognition converts far better than a bare link, because it gives the recipient a reason to click.

Coaches and booster groups can help within normal bounds. A team account posting the ballot after a season-ending win, a school community group passing the link along, a local business owned by a supporter mentioning it: all of that is ordinary community mobilization, and it is exactly the behavior a reader poll exists to measure. What crosses the line is manufactured volume, votes that no human attached to the community actually cast.

On the buying question, the honest answer has parts. Purchased votes for a fan poll are not criminal in the United States, but they sit outside the process The Citizen-Times designed, and platform terms at Crowdsignal restrict abuse of its service. No service, ours included, can guarantee a win, and any vendor promising a guaranteed result in a poll whose rules are unpublished is promising something no source supports. The general trade-offs are laid out in our buying votes overview and, for award polls specifically, our award votes page.

The risk falls on the nominee. If the organizer or the platform identifies a surge as artificial, the votes can be removed and the player's standing can suffer for something he did not do. A high school athlete's award is a community verdict; the cleanest version of it is the version the community actually cast. Supporters who want depth on the ethics and law can read our analysis of whether buying votes is legal.

Finally, keep the award in proportion. It is a reader poll, a capstone to a season's coverage, and a nice line in a player's story. It is not a scholarship, a championship or a scouting credential, and no prize value is published for it. Vote because the season deserved recognition, share the ballot because the community would want to know, and let the May window do the rest.