Vote for Eagle-Gazette Preseason Softball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why this preseason softball poll exists

This Eagle-Gazette preseason softball vote is a public ballot run by the Eagle-Gazette for its readership in Ohio. It sits in the sports vertical and focuses on high school softball, asking supporters to pick a standout player before the season gets under way. The organizer is a newspaper, so the vote functions as reader engagement built around local softball coverage rather than an industry award or a chamber prize.

Supporters are the families, classmates and fans of the nominated players. Each option on the ballot pairs a player's name with a school, so a reader can find their own community's nominee at a glance. Because the program is a preseason honor, the ballot appears in March, ahead of the softball season it previews, and it asks a single question with a single choice.

The balloting is hosted through Crowdsignal's poll.fm service. That platform supplies the poll page, the option list and the results screen; the newspaper decides the nominee list and publishes the vote to its audience. The confirmed ballot address for this program is the poll.fm page linked in the facts table below.

Which editions are confirmed and when the vote runs

The 2023, 2025 and 2026 cycles each produced a confirmed edition of this March ballot. The recurrence is annual, the vote falls in March each cycle, and the 2027 preseason should bring the next round. No year between 2023 and 2025 appears in the confirmed list, so the timeline shows the 2023 edition and then editions in the two most recent cycles.

The 2026 ballot is marked closed on poll.fm. Its results screen still shows the final standings: the leading nominee took 33 percent of the vote, a total of 35,394 votes, and the runner-up finished at 21 percent. Those figures come from the ballot's own result display and give a sense of how widely this poll travels through the Eagle-Gazette community, with tens of thousands of choices cast for a single preseason softball question.

What the organizer has not put on the ballot is a printed calendar: no exact opening day, closing day or nomination date accompanies the option list, so any supporter planning around the March window must confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The organizer also publishes no eligibility statement or frequency rule alongside the options, and no separate promotion round dates exist for this market. Everything else a supporter needs, the option list and the vote button, sits directly on the poll.fm page when an edition is live.

How a supporter casts a vote in the March ballot

The mechanic is the plainest form of public voting. A supporter loads the poll.fm page for the current edition, reads the list of nominees, selects one option and submits. Crowdsignal saves the choice and immediately shows the running results, with each nominee's percentage and vote count beside their name and school. No account, login or email is part of the ballot flow as displayed on the page.

Because the most recent ballot is closed, a supporter arriving today sees the final 2026 standings rather than an active vote. There is nothing to select until the newspaper posts its next preseason edition, expected in 2027. When that ballot goes up, the same three actions apply: open the page, pick a nominee, submit the choice.

The results screen is public, which shapes how supporters follow the race. Anyone can watch the percentages move while the March window is open, and the gap between nominees is visible in raw vote totals. For a program like this, where a leading nominee finished well clear of the field at 33 percent against 21 percent, that visible spread is part of what pulls a school community back to the page repeatedly during the voting days.

Supporters who want a wider view of Ohio publisher ballots can compare the Cincinnati Enquirer Athlete of the Week, which runs on the same weekly rhythm many newsrooms use for fan voting.

Where this ballot sits among Ohio's publisher votes

Ohio has an unusually dense field of newsroom fan votes, and this program occupies a specific niche inside it. The state's weekly athlete ballots, run by metros such as the Dayton Daily News and the Dayton football edition, refresh every week during a season. This program is different: it is a preseason, single-question award for softball, published by the Eagle-Gazette and decided in one March ballot rather than a rolling series.

Television also competes for the same audience. The Fox 8 FNTD Player of the Year Vote reaches viewers across the state with a broadcast-backed ballot, while this poll draws its support from a newspaper readership and the school communities its softball coverage serves.

What makes this program distinct is the combination of a preseason timing, a softball focus and a March window. A supporter looking for it should search by the newspaper's name and the sport, not by the generic athlete-of-the-week phrase, because the ballot only exists for a short stretch each spring. The full set of Ohio programs on this site includes the Akron weekly ballot as well, giving supporters several comparison points when deciding where their vote counts most.

Strengthening support in this specific ballot

Support in this poll comes down to one action: getting people to the poll.fm page during the short March window and having each of them select the nominee they back. Because the ballot lists options by school, sharing inside a school community, through team accounts, parent groups and class chats, reaches exactly the people most likely to vote. The visible results screen rewards steady turnout over the whole window rather than a single late push.

The Eagle-Gazette has not printed any rule about outside help for this ballot, so supporters should read whatever terms appear on the live poll before encouraging anything beyond ordinary sharing. Anyone considering paid support for a nominee can read award vote options first and understand what a purchase does and does not promise. Nothing on this page guarantees any finishing position.