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

What this poll is and who runs it

This award asks readers of The Citizen-Times to name the best girls soccer player from the regular season just completed. The newspaper's sports desk, which follows high school athletics across its North Carolina market, presents the poll on its own sports pages as part of that coverage rather than as a standalone sweepstakes or promotion.

Balloting is carried on Crowdsignal, the survey service reached through poll.fm. The live ballot can be found at poll.fm/15497983, and that address is the whole program as far as a supporter is concerned: the nominee list, the voting control and the closed-poll notice all live on that single page. No separate registration exists, no account is needed, and there is no second round; the poll presents its nominees and accepts selections until the organizer closes it.

This sits in the sport vertical, and unlike a weekly honor it is a season-long best-of award. Where many newspaper polls reset every week with a fresh set of nominees, this one names a single player of the year for the whole regular season, which changes how a supporter thinks about timing and about how long a nominee's name stays on the ballot.

The dated facts: editions, window and what is not printed

Two cycles of this poll are on the books, 2023 and 2025, and that is the basis for treating it as an annual program. The organizer's coverage of the current cycle describes the search for the top athlete of the 2026 regular season, so the series has continued past those years, and the voting month for the live edition is May.

The one precise deadline on the page comes from the organizer itself: "The voting will conclude on May 22 at noon." That sentence, published alongside the poll in The Citizen-Times' sports coverage, is the anchor for anyone planning a final push, because after noon on May 22 the ballot at poll.fm/15497983 displays as closed and further submissions stop counting.

Everything before that deadline is less documented. An opening date for the window, a nominee roster ahead of the ballot going live, and any statement on how frequently a person may submit are all absent from the organizer's materials; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The nomination process is likewise handled inside the newspaper's own reporting rather than through a public entry form, so supporters see the ballot only once the nominee list is already set.

That combination, a firm published close and an unpublished open, is the defining rhythm of this program: the useful planning date is the May 22 noon deadline, and everything earlier can only be checked on the ballot itself.

How a supporter votes today

Voting here takes only a couple of clicks. A supporter opens poll.fm/15497983 in any browser, and the Crowdsignal ballot loads directly with the full list of nominees. Each nominee appears with her school beside her name, so a reader can find a particular player by scanning for the school she represents rather than reading a long essay about each candidate.

Voting is a selection and a submit. The supporter marks the option beside her chosen nominee and presses the submit button beneath the list. The platform logs the selection at once and the page shows a confirmation. There is no login, no email verification step and no separate nomination round for the public; the nominee list is assembled by the newspaper before the ballot ever opens.

Two practical consequences follow. First, because the whole vote happens on a single page, the link a supporter shares is the same link everyone uses, and there is no benefit to hunting for a different entry point. Second, the poll's published close is May 22 at noon, so any plan to return and vote again, however often the rules permit, has to fit inside that window. Once the deadline passes, the ballot page flips to a closed notice and the count is settled with whatever was submitted.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

Plenty of newspaper and station polls operate in North Carolina, and most of the ones on this site run weekly. The Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week and its companion polls for boys and girls high school athletes reset with a new nominee list every week, so a supporter who skips a week loses that week's chance for good.

This Citizen Times poll works the other way. It opens around the end of the girls soccer regular season, keeps a single nominee list for the whole window, and closes on a stated date in May. A supporter has a longer runway but a narrower question: not who was best this week, but who was best across the season.

The other neighbours differ in subject as much as in rhythm. The Greensboro News & Record Player of the Week is a different publisher's weekly format, the Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week adds an academic criterion, and the North Carolina High School Baseball Player of the Week covers a spring sport with its own calendar. None of them is a substitute for this ballot; a girls soccer supporter who wants to influence the player of the year outcome has to vote here.

Strengthening support before the May close

Because this is a single-ballot poll with a published close, effective support is a timing exercise. The deadline of May 22 at noon is the fixed point, and the dependable pattern is to share the poll link early, while a school community still has time to respond, then send reminders as the deadline nears instead of counting on one message.

The Citizen-Times has printed no guidance on outside assistance or organized voting for this poll, so the practical advice is to work within what the ballot shows: a public form that any supporter can reach and submit. A message that names the nominee, includes the direct poll link and states the deadline hands a supporter everything needed to act in under a minute, which is what a shareable push needs to succeed. More general methods that fit this kind of single-question public poll are collected in our votes guide.