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

Program, organizer and platform at a glance

The WNC Girls Basketball Preseason Player of the Year, a public-vote award for western North Carolina high school girls basketball, honours the player the state's mountain communities judge the strongest entering the season. The organizer behind the programme is WNC, published as WNC Magazine, a magazine whose home on the web is wncmagazine.com and whose coverage area gives the award its name. The ballot itself is hosted on Crowdsignal, which operates the poll.fm platform, and the confirmed voting address is https://poll.fm/16287978. That address points to the specific girls basketball preseason poll, not to a generic listing page, which matters for supporters who want to land on the right form without searching.

The award belongs to the sport vertical and is decided entirely by reader participation. There is no jury, no panel and no editorial pick involved in the final result: the nominee with the most supporter votes when the poll closes takes the preseason title. That makes the format familiar to anyone who has taken part in a North Carolina high school athlete poll before, and it puts the outcome in the hands of whichever school community organises its base most effectively during the window.

Geographically, the programme is anchored in North Carolina. No single city is published as the award's home market; instead, the ballot draws nominees from school communities across the western part of the state, which is exactly what the WNC in the title signals. Schools named on the confirmed 2025 ballot include Reynolds, McDowell, Franklin, Mitchell, Mountain Heritage, Cherokee, Avery County, North Buncombe and Polk County, a spread that reaches across multiple counties in the mountains and foothills.

Key facts

Because the ballot is a preseason award, its rhythm sits ahead of the basketball season itself. The November window places the vote in the weeks before games count, which is why school communities treat it as an early-season rallying point. Everything a supporter needs to take part is on the single ballot page: the option list, the running percentages and the submit control.

Confirmed dates and edition history

The programme's confirmed history rests on editions in 2022 and 2025. Those are the years the ballot is known to have run, and the gap between them is simply what the published evidence supports. The 2025 edition is the most recent, and its voting window fell in November, with the poll opening and closing inside that month. The ballot page now carries a poll closed notice, so the 2025 edition has finished and its result stands.

Recurrence qualifies as annual on the strength of those confirmed edition years. What the published ballot page does not carry is a set of exact opening and closing dates for either edition. The month is confirmed, the year is confirmed, and the closed status is confirmed, but a day-level calendar is not. Supporters planning a push around a specific date therefore need to confirm on the live ballot each cycle, because WNC Magazine has not published a standing calendar for the award here.

The November timing makes sense for a preseason honour. Western North Carolina girls basketball teams begin regular-season play in the weeks that follow, so a poll that runs in November crowns its honoree while the season is still ahead of the players. That framing shapes how communities campaign: the push happens before schedules fill up, when school attention on the upcoming season is at its highest and sharing a ballot link feels like part of the buildup rather than a distraction from it.

For the next edition, the honest position is that nothing is published in advance on this page. The 2025 ballot is closed, the 2022 ballot predates it, and the pattern between them suggests the award returns, but the date of the next window is not announced here. The reliable habit for a supporter, a family member or a school account is to check the confirmed ballot address when the preseason approaches and to confirm on the live ballot each cycle. If a new poll has opened, the closed notice will be replaced by a live form and a fresh option list; if it has not, the 2025 result remains the latest published standing.

One more dated detail worth stating plainly: on the 2025 ballot, the leading option held 48% of the vote on 6,431 votes, and the runner-up held 33%. Those figures were displayed on the ballot page itself while the poll ran, and they give a sense of the scale the award reached in its most recent confirmed edition. A leader at 48% with a challenger at 33% describes a competitive race, the kind where a concentrated final push from a single school community can move the standings visibly before the window shuts.

The 2025 ballot, the schools and how the vote ran

The confirmed 2025 ballot listed its nominees as paired options, each player named alongside her school. The schools on that ballot were Reynolds, McDowell, Franklin, Mitchell, Mountain Heritage, Cherokee, Avery County, North Buncombe and Polk County. That list spans a wide slice of western North Carolina: mountain communities, county-seat towns and school districts that compete against each other through the winter. The pairing format matters for voters, because the school name beside each option is how most supporters find the right selection quickly on a long list.

Voting ran on Crowdsignal's poll.fm infrastructure, which presents the ballot as a simple option list with radio selections and a submit control. As votes arrived, the page displayed live percentages beside each option, so supporters could watch the race move in real time. That live-percentage display is how the 48% and 33% figures for the top options became visible during the November window, and it is also how a trailing school community can tell whether its outreach is working before the poll closes.

The 6,431 votes counted for the leading option say something about turnout. A preseason poll that draws thousands of votes for a single option is not a quiet sidebar; it is a ballot that school communities actively push. In markets like western North Carolina, where high school basketball carries genuine civic attention, that level of participation is typical of a well-organised preseason vote, with families, student sections and local accounts all pointing at the same link.

What the ballot page does not publish is a category roster beyond the single preseason player of the year question, and it does not state a per-supporter limit of any kind. The ballot page lists no category roster and no per-supporter limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That single line covers the most common questions supporters ask before voting: whether the poll is part of a larger awards programme with many categories, and whether a supporter can return to vote again. Neither answer is printed on the confirmed page, so the live form is the authority.

For schools and supporters weighing the effort a campaign takes, the shape of the 2025 result is instructive. A leader at 48% and a challenger at 33% means the race was not a runaway, and the gap between them was bridgeable with sustained outreach. Communities that wait until the final hours of a November window to start sharing the link generally find the deficit too large; communities that begin early, keep the link in circulation and remind their base through the month tend to close ground steadily. The mechanics are simple, the platform is reliable, and the deciding factor is organisation.

Rules, fair play and the question of purchased votes

The confirmed ballot page is short by design: a title, an option list, live percentages and a submit control. It publishes no rules text covering vote caps, repeat voting, eligibility or moderation. That silence has a practical consequence for anyone planning a campaign, whether organic or otherwise: the organizer's enforcement posture for this ballot is not stated here, so the only safe assumption is that WNC Magazine's own terms, wherever it publishes them, govern what counts as a valid vote. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle before building any plan on an assumption.

On the specific question of purchased votes, the honest framing is about what is known and what is not. The ballot is free to use, paidVoting is false, and nothing on the confirmed page invites or authorises paid participation. At the same time, no published rule for this ballot addresses bought votes, bots or voting software by name. Organizers of public polls routinely remove votes they judge irregular, and a preseason honour decided by school-community turnout is exactly the kind of ballot where an organizer watching a small town's vote total spike unnaturally may act. A result built on votes that get stripped after the fact helps nobody, and the nominee whose name sits on the line carries the reputational exposure.

The fair-play path is also the effective one on a ballot of this size. The 2025 race was decided by thousands of votes concentrated in a handful of school communities, which means the winning margin came from repeated, coordinated outreach: shared links in group chats, posts from school and booster accounts, reminders at games and practices, and asks that name the deadline. Those tactics cost nothing, they survive moderation, and they compound, because every genuine supporter who votes early becomes another voice asking later. For a fuller playbook of that kind, see how to get more votes online.

Supporters who nevertheless want to understand the paid-vote market, what such services claim and what the risks look like, can read the general references at buy votes online and buy award votes. The legal and policy picture around paid voting in public contests is covered at is buying votes legal, which sets out how organizer rules and platform terms interact. Reading those pages before acting is a better sequence than discovering an organizer's enforcement after the poll closes and the result is under review.

The bottom line for this ballot is unchanged by any of it: the poll is closed for 2025, the next window is not dated here, and the standings that count are the ones WNC Magazine publishes on its own ballot page. Whatever a supporter's approach, the organizer's live form and the organizer's published terms are the final authority on what a valid vote is, and the standings that stand are the ones the organizer leaves standing when the November window ends.

Related North Carolina high school vote programmes

Western North Carolina's preseason girls basketball poll is part of a broader family of North Carolina public-vote awards that run on the same supporter mechanics: a publisher or broadcaster puts up a ballot, school and fan communities mobilise, and the leader when the window closes takes the honour. Knowing the neighbouring programmes helps supporters who follow more than one sport or market, and it helps organisers who want to study how similar ballots in the same state are run.

Within this site's North Carolina coverage, the closest siblings by format are the Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week, the Charlotte Observer Boys High School Athlete of the Week and the Charlotte Observer Girls High School Athlete of the Week. Those three run on a weekly rhythm tied to the school sports calendar, which differs from the preseason single-window shape of the WNC award, but the supporter mechanics of sharing a link and rallying a base carry across all of them.

Elsewhere in the state, the Greensboro player of the week ballot serves the Piedmont market with the same weekly public-vote format, and the Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week adds an academic dimension to the athlete-recognition space. For the diamond side of the calendar, the North Carolina High School Baseball Player of the Week covers spring sports with the identical supporter-driven mechanic.

What separates the WNC award from those weekly programmes is timing and scope. The weekly ballots refresh continuously through a season, so a nominee who misses a week gets a fresh chance seven days later. The preseason honour is a single shot before the season starts: one November window, one ballot, one result, and a whole year of bragging rights attached to it. That concentration is why the 2025 race drew thousands of votes for its leading option and why school communities in Avery County, Cherokee, Franklin, McDowell, Mitchell, Mountain Heritage, North Buncombe, Polk County and the Reynolds district treat it as a priority when the ballot goes live.

For supporters following several of these ballots at once, the practical advice is the same across all of them: keep the exact ballot link rather than searching, watch the published window rather than assuming dates, and read each organizer's own instructions before campaigning. Every programme linked above has its own page on this site with its confirmed details, so a supporter moving from the WNC preseason poll to a Charlotte Observer weekly vote or the Greensboro weekly ballot can find the specifics for each without guessing.