The WNC Boys Basketball Preseason Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the WNC preseason player of the year poll is and who runs it

The WNC Boys Basketball Preseason Player of the Year is one fan ballot that lets western North Carolina basketball supporters pick the player they expect to dominate the upcoming high school season. It runs under the WNC banner, the magazine publisher whose home on the web is wncmagazine.com, and Crowdsignal carries the balloting through its poll.fm service, one of the most common homes for regional media fan polls in the United States.

This is a preseason feature, which separates it from the weekly athlete ballots North Carolina readers also see. Where a weekly series such as the Observer's weekly athlete ballot posts a fresh question every few days across every sport, this one asks about boys basketball only, and it opens in November, before the season has produced any results to argue about. The nominees are high school players drawn from programs across the region, and the 2025 page carried names from Andrews, Asheville Christian Academy, Christ School, Madison, North Buncombe, Owen, Pisgah, and Polk County.

The facts that define the program are gathered below.

Because the organizer publishes under a regional brand rather than a metro newspaper masthead, the market is best described as the magazine's western North Carolina readership rather than any single city.

The dated story of this ballot, and what WNC has not published

Two seasons are on the books, 2022 and 2025. The program's listing marks it as annual, with a next expected run in 2026, and the balloting window falls in November of each edition year, ahead of the boys basketball season that follows. 2025 is the latest season anyone can point to, and its question was hosted at poll.fm/16287977 under a title asking readers to pick the WNC boys basketball preseason player of the year.

That page is now closed. Crowdsignal keeps it reachable and shows the final standings, with the leading nominee credited at 42 percent and 7,158 votes behind the leader. Those two figures are the only numbers attached to the program that can be stated with confidence, and they describe the front-runner on the 2025 page rather than any ongoing state of the race.

Several facts a reader might want next are not published anywhere the program's standing material carries. No standing calendar gives the day each November window starts or ends, nor the nominee roster for a future cycle, nor any word on repeat voting, vote caps, or who may join in; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

There is also no published promotion schedule tied to this market on the platform side, so the ballot page is the lone dated signal a supporter has. Everything else, including whether the poll returns in a given November, is something WNC announces through its own channels when the preseason coverage begins.

How a supporter takes part on the poll.fm page today

Taking part could hardly be simpler. The question lives on a single Crowdsignal page, poll.fm/16287977 for the 2025 season. While a poll is live, the page lists the nominees, each shown as a player paired with a high school program. A supporter marks the selection beside the chosen nominee and sends the form. Crowdsignal logs the choice and updates the running tally shown on the same page, so a voter can immediately see where their pick sits in the field.

Right now that specific page shows the 2025 poll as closed, which means nothing can be cast on it. The page still serves a purpose: it displays the final standings from the latest season, including that front-running count of 7,158 votes at 42 percent. When WNC opens the next preseason question, it will live at a new poll.fm address, and the closed page is where readers have historically picked up the series' trail.

Because the form carries no login, no nomination round, and no published eligibility statement, the practical experience for a supporter is: open the page, click a name, submit. The absence of a login also means the organizer has published nothing about duplicate-vote handling, so anyone hoping to vote a second time has no stated rule to lean on either way. The honest position is that the form is open and simple, the tally is public, and whatever limits exist are whatever the organizer enforces quietly behind the scenes.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

North Carolina has a busy fan-poll scene, and this program is unusual within it. Its closest neighbours are weekly series tied to metro newsrooms. The Charlotte Observer runs a weekly athlete ballot alongside separate boys and girls high school editions, and the Greensboro daily runs its own Player of the Week. There is also a statewide high school baseball player of the week and the Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week from the ABC45 television market.

Against that field, the WNC ballot differs in three ways. It is seasonal rather than weekly, asking its question once each preseason instead of recycling a fresh page every few days. It is single sport, covering boys basketball only, where the weekly series rotate across every activity the school year produces. And its publisher is a regional magazine brand rather than a metro daily, which puts the emphasis on the magazine's western North Carolina readership rather than a single city's footprint.

For a nominee's camp, that shape matters. A weekly ballot rewards a burst of support inside a few days, again and again across a season. A preseason poll rewards a concentrated push in a single November window, after which the result is final and the page closes with its tally frozen. The count that wins here is settled before the first game is played, which is exactly the argument the poll is designed to host.

Strengthening support in a single-shot preseason poll

Because this ballot asks its question once and closes, the useful window for a nominee's supporters is short. The on-file seasons run in November, so the push belongs to the weeks before the season starts, not to a mid-season surge. Share the poll.fm link in the places basketball families already gather: team parent group chats, the school's booster page, and the athletic department's own posts. Each vote costs a supporter seconds, since the form has no login step, and the public tally on the page gives everyone a reason to check back.

WNC has published no statement about outside help, vote services, or coordinated campaigns for this ballot, so nobody can say in advance how the organizer would treat an artificially inflated count. What is safe is what any fan can do: post the link, make the ask, and remind people before the window shuts. For a fuller rundown of methods that work on public ballots of this kind, see our guide to getting more votes online, and if a purchased option is under consideration, read how award-vote services are structured with the organizer's silence in mind.