Times-Reporter Girls Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Times-Reporter ballot matters locally

The Times-Reporter Girls Basketball Player of the Year belongs to a specific community: the readers of The Times Reporter, an Ohio newspaper whose registered home online is timesreporter.com. Every winter the paper covers high school girls basketball across its coverage area, and when the season winds down it hands the final judgement to that readership. The vote is not a panel award and not a coaches' selection. A parent in the stands, a teammate's neighbour, a grandparent following scores from out of town: any of them can open the ballot and register a choice.

That community shape is why the numbers on the 2025-26 edition are meaningful. The leading finisher on the closed ballot collected 24,796 votes, a 46 percent share of the total, which only happens when an organised fan base mobilises around a newspaper link. The award sits on a Crowdsignal form reached through poll.fm, the platform many newsrooms use for reader polls, and the direct address for the season ballot is poll.fm/16729182.

Each name on the form belongs to a student still enrolled in high school, so the programme is described here without reproducing the individual player names that appear on the ballot. The full nominee list, each entry shown with a class year and the school she represents, is on the closed 2025-26 ballot page itself, which is the appropriate place to read it.

The dated record: editions, the March window and what the paper has not published

Two editions are confirmed for this programme: 2025 and 2026. The 2026 edition is tied to the 2025-26 girls basketball season, and its ballot title says so outright: "2025-26 Times-Reporter Girls Basketball Player of the Year". The timing evidence places the voting window in March, with no separate nomination round before it, and the ballot now carries the label "Poll Closed", which means the 2025-26 vote has finished and the results page shows final standings.

That closed status is the single most important dated fact for anyone arriving at this page today. A visitor to poll.fm/16729182 cannot add a vote to the 2025-26 edition; the page displays the outcome, including the 24,796-vote total and the 46 percent share for the top finisher, rather than an active form. The next action point for supporters is the paper's decision to open a new ballot for the following season, which would be its third edition after those two confirmed years.

Several details around the programme are simply not published. The paper states no opening day and no closing day for the window; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The newspaper has also never published a per-voter rule for this ballot, so no daily limit or one-vote restriction appears anywhere on the page. There is no stated prize description and no published eligibility text for the nominees. Each of those gaps belongs to the organizer's page, not to guesswork, and the safest reading of the programme treats the ballot page itself as the only authoritative statement of its own rules.

How a supporter votes on the Times-Reporter girls basketball ballot

The mechanic on the 2025-26 ballot is a plain public vote, the simplest form Crowdsignal offers, running as a single form at the poll.fm address. A visitor opens the link, sees the girls basketball nominees The Times Reporter listed with their class years, selects one, and presses the vote button. The form then shows the updated result shares immediately, so the voter can see the standing of her choice the moment the ballot is logged. No account creation step is printed on the page and no payment of any kind is part of the process.

Because the ballot is a season award rather than a weekly series, a supporter gets one concentrated window in March to act, not a rolling seven-day cycle. That timing rewards preparation: the schools whose families and student sections share the link on the day the poll opens tend to build an early lead that is hard to close. The 24,796 votes behind the 2025-26 front-runner are the size of the mobilisation this ballot can produce when a community commits to it.

Three practical points arise from this format. First, the paper has not published a rule on repeat voting, so nobody outside the newsroom can state how often one person may return; the ballot page is the only place such a rule would live. Second, the poll shows live percentages, which means supporters can track the gap between nominees and pace their outreach accordingly. Third, when the poll closes, the page converts into a results display, and the vote button disappears. Any strategy for the next edition therefore has to be built around the opening day, whatever date the paper eventually prints on its own ballot.

How this ballot sits beside Ohio's other player of the year and athlete of the week votes

Ohio has a dense field of reader-voted high school sports programmes, and the Times-Reporter ballot is unusual among them in two ways. It is a girls basketball award rather than a general athlete vote, and it is a season-ending player of the year decision rather than a weekly instalment. Neighbouring programmes on this site cover the same state with different rhythms: the Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote is a television station's award, while the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week and the Columbus Dispatch Athlete of the Week are large-metro newspaper series that reset every seven days.

The weekly shape changes supporter behaviour. In a seven-day series such as the Dayton Daily News High School Athlete of the Week, momentum resets constantly and a strong single performance can win the week. In the Times-Reporter format, a whole season of community goodwill compresses into the March window, so the winner is usually the player whose school network can sustain attention for a fortnight. The Dayton High School Football Player of the Week and the Akron-area series both run on that recurring weekly clock, which this ballot does not share.

What the programmes have in common is the hosting pattern: newspapers and broadcasters across the state use public votes to convert sports coverage into audience participation, and Crowdsignal is a frequent home for those forms. For a supporter, the practical difference comes down to planning: a weekly vote rewards a fast response each cycle, while a player of the year ballot rewards an organised season-long push that lands when the March window opens.

Strengthening support for a Times-Reporter girls basketball nominee

Support for a nominee on this ballot comes from one place: the readership The Times Reporter has built through its girls basketball coverage, reached through the poll.fm link the paper publishes. Because the whole vote compresses into the March window for the season award, the campaigns that do well are the ones that prepare before the ballot opens. Team parents, the athletic department's social accounts and the school's booster channels can agree in advance on a shared link and a posting plan, so that the first day of voting produces a surge rather than a trickle.

The organizer's published position on outside help is simply that none is stated: the ballot page carries no rule text on purchased votes, automated voting or eligibility. That silence is a gap, not permission, and it is the paper's page that would carry any rule if one exists. The transparency point matters most because the nominees are minors; a newspaper poll involving high school students is the last place where a result should be open to challenge after the fact. Readers weighing support options can review how these services work on the votes guide before deciding anything, and should weigh the paper's unstated rules against any package on offer. For a community award decided by a 46 percent plurality, the outcome's credibility with the whole coverage area is part of what the winning player takes away.