North Dakota 9B Preseason Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the North Dakota 9B Preseason Player of the Year is

Prep Redzone, the high school football publisher behind prepredzone.com, hands North Dakota's 9-man football class a preseason honor decided entirely by public vote. The "9B" in the name refers to the state's 9-man classification, so the ballot covers a specific tier of small-school football rather than the statewide field that Prep Redzone's larger honors address. It sits in the sport vertical and is decided by supporters, not by a panel of coaches or writers.

The mechanics live on Crowdsignal, the polling platform better known by its poll.fm domain. The confirmed ballot sits at poll.fm/12618029, and that link is where the most recent edition's vote and its closed results both live. Crowdsignal handles the vote button, the tally and the results view; Prep Redzone handles everything editorial, from assembling the nominee slate with each player's position and school to publishing the preseason coverage that surrounds the poll.

The program is statewide in reach but classification-specific in focus. Prep Redzone's North Dakota desk supplies the nominees, and the supporters who show up are followers of 9-man football: families, classmates, local fans and the broader small-school community that follows the class each fall. Because the vote is a preseason exercise, it measures expectation rather than season results, which is what separates it from Prep Redzone's end-of-year balloting.

The table below gathers the fixed points a reader can rely on:

The dated record: editions, window and what stays unpublished

The program has a short but consistent dated history. Its confirmed run-years are 2023, 2024 and 2025, and every one of those ballots is anchored to August, the preseason stretch before the 9-man schedule begins. The 2025 ballot, identified on Crowdsignal as poll 12618029, carried a slate of preseason nominees for the 9B class, which makes the series a recurring August fixture, not a one-off promotion.

The most detailed dated evidence comes from the 2024 edition's closed results. That ballot closed with the leading nominee line at 43 percent of the vote on 23,109 logged selections, and the next line at 38 percent. A five-point margin on a turnout above twenty thousand tells you the poll attracts serious participation from the 9B community, and that the closed result remains public after the window ends.

What Prep Redzone has not done is publish the fine print on the ballot page. The opening day and closing day of the window are absent from it, and no nomination round is described separately from the vote. There is also no printed statement of a per-supporter frequency rule or an eligibility note for nominees; the ballot page presents the slate and the vote button and stops. Anyone who needs the current edition's opening day and closing day should confirm on the live ballot each cycle, because Prep Redzone issues a fresh Crowdsignal poll for every edition and the old links serve the closed results of their own years.

A supporter planning outreach should read the window as an August event with a short runway. Preseason polls live and die on early momentum, and the 2024 tally shows how much ground a nominee can lose to a rival line that banks its share before the final stretch.

How a supporter votes in the current 9B preseason ballot

Crowdsignal media polls keep the mechanic simple, and this one is no exception. A supporter opens the live ballot at poll.fm, scans the nominee list that Prep Redzone has formatted with each player's position and school affiliation, taps the selection control next to the line they want to back, and submits. No account creation, no write-in box and no fee are described on the ballot page. The results view that follows the submission shows the live percentage split, so a supporter can see exactly where their nominee stands at the moment they voted.

Because each edition is a fresh poll, the link matters. The confirmed ballot at poll.fm/12618029 served the most recent edition, and after the August window closes it flips to a closed state that displays the finishing percentages and totals rather than accepting new selections. A supporter who lands on a closed poll is seeing a prior year's result; the current edition lives on a new Crowdsignal link that Prep Redzone promotes through its preseason articles.

Two practical cautions follow from that structure. First, the current ballot page is the final word on the rules: if the platform applies any frequency control on a given edition, it is enforced at the poll interface, not published in advance by the organizer. Second, the results are cumulative and public, so a nominee's standing is visible to every rival's supporters throughout the window. In a race shaped like the 2024 edition, where the leading line held 43 percent against a 38 percent challenger on more than twenty thousand selections, sustained turnout rather than a single late push is what separates the finishing order.

Supporters who want a fuller walkthrough of the sequence can follow the voting steps on this page, which mirror the literal actions the ballot asks for today.

How the 9B preseason vote sits among North Dakota ballots

North Dakota's public-vote landscape gives 9B followers several overlapping ballots, and the differences matter. The closest relative is Prep Redzone's own North Dakota High School Player of the Year, which broadens the field beyond the 9-man class and runs on a different seasonal rhythm. The preseason 9B ballot is narrower and earlier: it asks who is expected to stand out in the small-school classification before the season starts, while the statewide honor assesses the year as a whole.

The best-of programs cover different ground again. Best of the Best - Best of the Midwest and the Bismarck Tribune Best of the Best are readers-choice surveys over local businesses and services, not athlete ballots, and they answer to their own publishers. The CommunityVotes series runs the same way in three separate markets: CommunityVotes Bismarck, CommunityVotes Fargo and CommunityVotes Grand Forks, each covering its own city under its own tally.

The Prep Redzone 9B ballot stands apart through its combination of a single classification, a single publisher and a single August window. A vote cast here reaches exactly the audience that follows 9-man football, and it is counted on a platform the organizer controls directly rather than through a citywide survey. For a nominee's backers, that means a smaller, sharper electorate than the business best-of polls, where the 2024 turnout figure shows the ceiling the 9B community can reach when the slate resonates.

Strengthening support in the 9B preseason poll

A preseason poll rewards organizers of support more than spontaneous voters, and this ballot's shape tells a backer where to aim. The electorate is the 9-man football community: teammates, the student body, local fans and the families around the nominee's school. Sharing the live poll.fm link through those circles, with a plain request to pick the right line and submit, is the action that moves the percentage split a supporter sees after voting. Because the results are public and cumulative, every stretch of quiet lets a rival's line bank share, so reminders spread across the whole August window beat a single late appeal.

What Prep Redzone says about outside help is, on the evidence of the ballot page, nothing at all: no purchase rule, no frequency statement and no eligibility note are printed there, and Prep Redzone has stayed silent on its own position. That silence does not license anything; it simply means the live ballot is the only authority, and a supporter should follow whatever the current poll page instructs. Anyone considering paid support can read what is generally true about the practice at buy award votes, which covers award-style ballots like this one, and factor in that silence from Prep Redzone before committing. What a backer controls without any of that is turnout: consistent community outreach, honest reminders and early momentum are the levers the 2024 results show actually decide these races.