StarNews Wilmington-Area Midseason Volleyball Player of the Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the StarNews midseason volleyball poll is and who runs it

StarNews runs the Wilmington-Area Midseason Volleyball Player of the Year Poll as a public-vote award for its readers at the midpoint of the high school volleyball season. The publication covers Wilmington and the surrounding North Carolina coast, and this midseason honor asks those readers which Wilmington-area athlete deserves the nod, with the public vote itself deciding the result.

StarNews hosts the vote on Crowdsignal, whose ballots live at poll.fm addresses. The 2025 edition sat at poll.fm/16035653, and that address is the one this page carries as the voting link throughout. The ballot title read "2025 StarNews Wilmington-area Midseason Volleyball Player of the Year Poll," with a closed marker appended once the window ended.

StarNews publishes reader votes across North Carolina high school sports, and this midseason volleyball edition sits inside that family of ballots. The schools named on the 2025 nominee list sit in the Wilmington area, which is the market the publication covers, so the poll is a local reader exercise rather than a statewide one.

The dated history of the StarNews midseason volleyball vote

Confirmed editions of the poll run in 2022 and 2025, and the 2025 edition is the cycle whose ballot text survives in full. Its title carried the year, and its voting window was printed on the ballot itself: "now through Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 11:59 p.m." That line makes September the month the 2025 vote closed, at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 30, and it is the only deadline the program has published for any edition.

The same page listed 27 nominees for the player of the year honor, all of them Wilmington-area high school volleyball players drawn from the schools StarNews covers. Once the window passed, the ballot was marked closed, so a reader arriving at poll.fm/16035653 now sees the finished 2025 edition rather than a live vote.

The ballot itself carries no category roster: the program asks its player-of-the-year question about the midseason honor, and no further categories are printed beside it. Also absent is any printed rule on how often a supporter may submit, whether repeat visits count, and who is eligible to take part. StarNews has not published those terms anywhere on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the StarNews poll.fm ballot

Voting in this poll is a plain public ballot with no entry form and no nomination step for the voter to complete. The supporter opens the StarNews ballot on poll.fm, reads down the nominee list, selects the player of the year choice and submits. Nothing else stands between the reader and the count.

The 2025 page presented its Wilmington-area high school volleyball nominees, each listed by name with her school, under the headline "2025 StarNews Wilmington-area Midseason Volleyball Player of the Year Poll." A Crowdsignal submit control sits at the bottom of the list; pressing it logs the choice and the platform returns the running results to the same page.

No account screen, sign-in prompt or eligibility questionnaire appears on the ballot page, and StarNews prints no instructions limiting who may take part or how often. That silence cuts both ways: it keeps the mechanic simple for a first-time visitor, and it leaves repeat-voting behavior to the platform's own handling, which the ballot page leaves unstated. A supporter planning multiple visits should watch what the live form allows rather than assume a rule the page never states.

Because the confirmed 2025 page is marked closed, a visitor landing on poll.fm/16035653 today sees the finished edition. When StarNews posts the next midseason ballot, the same steps apply, and the new address will replace the old link as the live voting page.

How this poll sits beside its North Carolina sibling ballots

This midseason volleyball vote is one of six North Carolina public ballots covered alongside it here, run by six different publishers across different markets. In Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week runs as a weekly honor, with separate boys and girls high school editions at the boys ballot and the girls ballot. Greensboro's paper runs the Greensboro News & Record Player of the Week for the Triad market, statewide television covers scholar athletes through the Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week, and baseball has its own track in the North Carolina High School Baseball Player of the Week.

What separates the StarNews poll from all of them is timing and scope: it is a midseason player-of-the-year question for volleyball alone, confined to the Wilmington area, rather than a weekly honor that rotates across sports and markets. That shape matters to supporters because a midseason ballot is decided before the season's back half, so momentum built early carries the result. It also means the nominee pool is fixed when the ballot publishes, as the 2025 list was, rather than refreshing week to week.

Supporters of a weekly honor plan around a steady rhythm of returns across a season, while the StarNews vote concentrates all of its energy into the September window, and a missed deadline ends the campaign outright.

Building support inside the StarNews September window

Support in this poll comes down to how many people open the poll.fm page and submit for the right name, so the practical work is mobilizing the school community around the exact ballot link. Team families, booster groups and class accounts can pass the URL directly instead of making supporters search for it, which matters on a midseason ballot where the window is short and the nominee list is fixed at publication. StarNews has printed no rule restricting how supporters promote the vote, and it also prints no per-person voting terms, so promotion should stay within whatever the live ballot allows. For a fuller toolkit that suits newspaper player-of-the-year ballots like this StarNews vote, see how to get more votes online; award-style contests and their vote dynamics are covered separately at buy award votes.