Erie Times-News Seaway Window and AHN Sports Medicine Preseason Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Seaway Window and AHN Sports Medicine preseason poll is

The Erie Times-News Seaway Window and AHN Sports Medicine Preseason Football Player of the Year is a preseason vote for high school football run by the Erie Times-News, the daily newspaper serving Erie, Pennsylvania. The title carries two partner names, Seaway Window and AHN Sports Medicine, printed alongside the publisher on the ballot series. Crowdsignal hosts the vote through poll.fm, and the 2026 ballot sits at poll.fm/17340617.

The poll covers preseason high school football, asking readers to pick a player of the year before the PIAA season gets under way. An article on goerie.com, the publisher's own site, welcomed readers to "the start of Erie Times-News Seaway Window and AHN Sports Medicine ballots for the PIAA's 2026-27 calendar year," which ties the vote to Pennsylvania's high school sports governing body and to a season spanning 2026 and 2027.

The mechanic is a straightforward public choice: any reader who opens the ballot can back a nominee, and the outcome is a single preseason player of the year. Because each nominee is a minor still in school, this page describes the field by publisher, sport and season rather than by name; the ballot itself lists every nominee with the school he represents.

Facts at a glance

Edition history and the August 2026 window

This preseason poll has confirmed runs in 2023 and 2026. That pair of years is the basis on which the program counts as annual, and it means the 2026 preseason vote was not a one-off experiment but the latest run of a series the publisher has returned to across several seasons.

The 2026 edition ran in August, matching the preseason slot the program name promises, and the ballot is now marked closed on poll.fm. The publisher's article framed it as the opening ballot of the Erie Times-News Seaway Window and AHN Sports Medicine series for the PIAA's 2026-27 calendar year, so further named ballots in that same series follow it through the school year.

Several details sit outside what the organizer has put in print. The ballot page does not show the precise start and finish times for the August window, and the publisher has not posted a schedule for a 2027 edition. Neither the ballot page nor the sports desk prints a cap on repeat voting or an eligibility rule for this preseason poll; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The practical takeaway for a supporter is simple: the reliable signal that a new edition has opened is the publisher's own announcement, and the reliable source for that edition's rules is the live ballot itself, not anything carried over from 2023 or 2026.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

Voting is a short sequence on the Crowdsignal ballot. A supporter opens poll.fm/17340617, reads the nominee list, selects one player and submits. The 2026 ballot accepted a single selection per submission, and the platform confirmed the choice immediately after the submit control beneath the list was pressed.

That ballot is now closed, so the sequence above describes what a supporter will do when the next edition opens rather than something that can be completed today. The poll's title tells you when to look: preseason, before the PIAA calendar gets going, which for the 2026 edition meant August. Watching the Erie Times-News sports section at the end of the next summer is the practical way to catch the opening.

Two things the ballot does not do are worth stating plainly. It printed no account or sign-in requirement in 2026, and it printed no statement about how frequently a single person may vote. Both points are visible only on the live ballot for whichever edition is running, so a supporter planning a coordinated push should read the current ballot's own terms before relying on how the 2026 edition behaved.

The nominee list changes with each edition, since it reflects that year's preseason field of high school players, so last year's names are no guide to the next ballot.

Where this poll sits among Pennsylvania's fan votes

Pennsylvania has a dense field of public sports polls, and this one occupies a specific slot in it: a preseason, single-edition player of the year vote for high school football, anchored to one publisher's readership in Erie. That separates it from the weekly player-of-the-week formats that run all season elsewhere in the state.

The closest neighbours on this site make the contrast concrete. Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week honors performance week by week during the season, while this Erie ballot asks readers to judge the preseason field once. Mr. PA Football operates at statewide scale, and PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week covers a different sport and a different publisher's market entirely.

Two more siblings round out the set: Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year, a spring-sport equivalent, and Morning Call Athlete of the Week from another Pennsylvania newspaper. WICU Athlete of the Year is the nearest geographically, since WICU also serves the Erie television market, but it is a separate organizer with its own ballot.

What makes the Erie Times-News poll distinct is the partnership structure in its name and the preseason timing, which gives it a short, concentrated window rather than a season-long series.

Building support during the short preseason window

The preseason slot shapes everything about campaigning here. The 2026 edition ran in August and closed within days, so a nominee's supporters had a narrow window in which every share, group message and team-parent push counted. Waiting for the final hours is a poor fit for a ballot this short; the families and classmates who vote early set the tone the rest of the readership sees when they open the ballot.

The organizer has printed no policy on outside voting help for this series, so the safe ground is the outreach a nominee's own community does: the school's social accounts, the booster network and local football groups in the Erie area. Our guide on getting more votes covers that kind of organic mobilization in detail.

For readers weighing paid support, the honest framing is on our award-votes page: what any outside help can and cannot do depends on the live ballot's own rules, which for this poll are not published ahead of each edition.