Ashland Times-Gazette Softball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Ashland Times-Gazette Softball Player of the Year is

This award lets readers, not a newsroom panel, decide which high school softball athlete takes home the Times-Gazette's year-end honor. The Ashland Times-Gazette, the newspaper serving Ashland, Ohio, organizes the vote and names the nominees from the school communities its coverage reaches.

Crowdsignal, the platform behind poll.fm, hosts the balloting, and the form lives at https://poll.fm/15616771. That single address is where supporters go during a live window and where the final standings remain visible after a poll closes. The 2025 ballot carries the title "2025 Ashland Times-Gazette Softball Player of the Year" with a closed marking, which is how the page now presents the finished edition.

The award sits in the sport vertical and uses a straight public-vote mechanic: one ballot, one list of nominees, one submission at a time. Nothing is charged to take part, and no separate judging round is published alongside the fan count.

Because the newspaper carries the award under its own masthead, the program's identity is stable even as each year's nominee list changes. The platform and the ballot address are the two constants a supporter can rely on when a new cycle opens.

The dated edition history and the June 2025 window

Two editions of the award are confirmed: 2022 and 2025. The program is annual, and 2026 is the year the next edition would be expected, though the newspaper has not yet posted a 2026 ballot or a schedule for it.

The 2025 edition's voting fell in June, with the ballot opening and closing inside that month. The poll has since closed, and the page now displays final results rather than a live form. That June slot is the only window month the confirmed edition establishes; the newspaper has put neither a category slate, nor a per-person ceiling, nor the precise open and close dates on its softball ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The closed 2025 ballot shows how decisive the community vote was. The leading nominee finished with 4,059 votes, about 25 percent of the total displayed. The runner-up in that count drew 2,788 votes, roughly 17 percent. Those two figures, published on the poll page itself, give a concrete sense of the scale a single softball nominee can reach in an Ashland-area fan vote.

Nominees on the 2025 ballot came from the school communities the paper covers, with Ashland, Black River and Crestview among those represented. Each name carried the nominee's school beside it, so readers could find a player from their own community quickly.

For anyone tracking the program forward, the practical markers are simple: a new ballot title carrying the year, a June-style window, and a results page that stays up after closing. Everything beyond that is set by the newspaper when it publishes the next edition.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

The whole process is quick. A supporter loads the Crowdsignal form at poll.fm/15616771, scans the slate of softball nominees, marks one name, and submits. Crowdsignal registers the choice immediately, and during a live window the supporter can simply leave the page and come back later.

The publisher's stated rule for its polls is that readers may vote "as often as you'd like." That single phrase is the most important operational fact on the page: it means a family, a team roster or a classmate group can organize repeated returns to the ballot across the whole window without hitting a published ceiling. No separate registration step is advertised with the ballot, and the newspaper attaches no published eligibility test to the act of voting.

What the form does after close matters too. The 2025 page keeps every nominee visible with her share of the vote and her raw total beside the name, so the community can see exactly where its support landed. That transparency is typical of Crowdsignal polls and gives the award its public character.

Two practical notes follow from the mechanic. First, because the ballot is a single selection form, splitting support across names only helps opponents; a community backing one player should concentrate on that name. Second, because the poll closes on the newspaper's schedule, late pushes have a hard stop, and the final standings freeze the moment the window ends.

Anyone planning support for a future nominee should therefore build the campaign around repeat visits and easy link sharing, both of which the ballot's own rules invite.

How this ballot sits beside other Ohio fan votes

Ashland's softball award is one of several Ohio public-vote programs a supporter might encounter, and it differs from most of them in shape. The Akron-Area High School Athlete of the Week, the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week are all weekly cycles tied to big-city newsrooms, resetting every seven days with a fresh nominee list.

The Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week and the Dayton High School Football Player of the Week follow the same weekly rhythm, while the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote is a television-station award with a season-ending frame.

The Ashland Times-Gazette award is different in three ways. It is a year-end honor for one sport, softball, rather than a rolling weekly poll. Its publisher is a community newspaper anchored in Ashland rather than a metro daily or a broadcaster, so the nominee pool draws from a tighter set of school communities. And its confirmed editions, 2022 and 2025, make it a seasonal fixture whose window falls in June rather than a fixture of the fall football calendar.

For a supporter, that shape changes the strategy. A weekly poll rewards fast mobilization inside a few days; a year-end award like this one rewards sustained, repeated support across a longer window, which is exactly what the publisher's voting rule permits.

Building real support for a nominee in this poll

Because the ballot allows voting as often as you'd like, the strongest legal play in this program is organized repetition. A team that sets a daily reminder to visit poll.fm/15616771 and vote for its nominee converts the publisher's own rule into steady volume, and no one can question support that the ballot explicitly invites.

Make the link effortless to find. Post the ballot address directly in the team's group chat, the booster club's page and the school's softball social accounts, so supporters never have to search for the poll and land somewhere else. Every extra click between a willing voter and the form costs votes.

Keep the ask inside the newspaper's framework. The organizer publishes its voting rule openly, and a campaign that follows it has nothing to answer for; a campaign that tries to manufacture volume the ballot does not permit puts the nominee's standing at risk. If you are comparing outside options, our overview of buying votes explains the landscape, and the votes guide covers organic tactics that work in newspaper-run polls like this one.

Start early in the window rather than banking everything on a final-day surge, since the close date is the newspaper's to set and the standings freeze at that moment.