StarNews End-of-Season: VOTE: StarNews End-of Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the StarNews End-of-Season football vote is and who runs it

This programme hands out an end-of-season honour in North Carolina high school football, decided entirely by public vote. Its full name is StarNews End-of-Season: VOTE: StarNews End-of Football Player of the Year. The organiser listed for the programme is StarNews End-of-Season, and the publisher behind that banner is StarNews, a newspaper whose high school sports desk sits at the centre of the award. The ballot lives on Crowdsignal, reachable at the poll.fm address https://poll.fm/16342050.

The vertical is sport, and the shape of the award is a single end-of-season honour rather than a weekly recognition series. That matters for supporters: instead of a fresh ballot every few days, the programme concentrates attention on one Player of the Year choice made after the football season concludes. Casting a pick is open to everyone, costs nothing, and takes the form of one ballot where nominees appear alongside the high schools they represent.

Here are the programme's fixed facts, laid out together.

Everything a supporter needs to recognise the programme is in that pairing: a newspaper name, an end-of-season banner, a football award, and a poll.fm ballot that carries the vote.

The dated facts: editions, the December window and the printed result

Two years carry confirmed editions for this ballot: 2022 and 2025. That pair is what qualifies the End-of-Season vote as an annual fixture rather than a one-off, and it is the full extent of the published history. No edition between those two years and none earlier is confirmed anywhere on the ballot StarNews hosts.

The window is dated to December. The host assigns both the start and the close of the voting phase to that single month, which makes this one of the most compact balloting windows a supporter will encounter: a whole Player of the Year decision compressed into the tail end of the football calendar. The 2025 edition carried a closed status once it ended, so late arrivals to that ballot found the result settled rather than an open form.

The 2025 result is also partly public. The host printed running shares beside the options, and those figures put the two Pender nominees at 65 percent and 17 percent, with West Brunswick's entry at 14 percent. The ballot drew its options from schools including Pender, Hoggard, Ashley, Trask, North Brunswick and West Brunswick, a spread that shows the award reaching across the paper's high school football coverage rather than narrowing to a single programme.

What StarNews has not printed is the exact opening and closing day for any edition, the round schedule on poll.fm, or a per-supporter limit on submissions; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the StarNews End-of-Season poll today

Casting a vote here takes no more than a minute. A supporter loads the poll.fm address StarNews publishes, and the Crowdsignal form presents the nominee list directly: no sign-in, no entry form and no separate nomination stage stand in front of the vote. Each option pairs a player with his high school, so the first job of a supporter is finding their own school on the list before marking anything.

Choosing is a single-select action. The supporter marks the one nominee they want to back and submits, and the host can then show percentages accumulating beside each option, which is exactly how the 2025 shares became visible while that ballot was live. There is no printed second round, no runoff and no bracket: the poll is one form, one phase, one tally.

The timing question a supporter actually faces is different from the mechanic. Because the window is compressed into December and StarNews does not print the exact days, the practical move is to follow the paper's sports coverage at season's end and act as soon as the new ballot appears. An open Crowdsignal form accepts submissions until the organiser flips it to closed, as happened with the 2025 edition.

One honest limit belongs here. StarNews has not published any text on how often a single supporter may submit, whether repeat votes are filtered, or what eligibility governs the roster, so the live form alone speaks to those points while a ballot is open.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

Within North Carolina's public-vote sports programmes, this one stands out for its cadence and its scope. In Charlotte, the Athlete of the Week series run by the Observer, together with its boys and girls high school editions, rolls out fresh ballots every few days across many sports. The StarNews End-of-Season vote instead concentrates on one sport and one award, decided in a single phase after the football season.

The other neighbours reinforce the pattern. In Greensboro, the News & Record Player of the Week comes from a different publisher on a weekly rhythm, the Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week folds academics into its athletics recognition, and the state's weekly baseball ballot applies the recurring format to a spring sport. None of them combines a statewide newspaper banner with an end-of-season football trophy the way this ballot does.

For a supporter, the differences are practical, not cosmetic. A weekly series rewards a school community that can mobilise repeatedly across a season, while the StarNews End-of-Season vote rewards a single, well-timed push in December. The host differs too: this programme runs on Crowdsignal through poll.fm, which prints running percentages and a closed status, giving the result a visible finish that a one-off award needs. Among the state's publisher-run ballots, that makes the StarNews football vote the seasonal anchor of its genre.

Supporting a nominee in the StarNews End-of-Season vote

Helping a nominee here means working within a very short runway. The whole voting phase sits in December, and StarNews does not print the exact days, so the first task is catching the ballot the week it appears. Because the form is a single-select Crowdsignal poll with no sign-in, every share of the poll.fm link lowers the effort for a supporter to roughly two taps.

The organiser's printed rules give little to plan around. StarNews has published no statement on outside help for this poll, and no per-supporter limit appears on the ballot page, which means neither a mass outreach campaign nor a repeat-voting strategy can be checked against published terms in advance. The safest ground is the obvious one: rally the school community, the student sections and the local followings around each nominee while the form is open, since the 2025 result shows the outcome decided by whatever each school's network could deliver.

Supporters who want a broader picture of outreach methods that fit a compressed window can read the votes guide, and anyone weighing paid support should first read the legality explainer, because the organiser here is silent on the question rather than permissive.