The Beaver County Times Preseason Boy's Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Beaver County Times preseason basketball vote is

The Beaver County Times, the daily newspaper serving Beaver County in western Pennsylvania, runs The Preseason Boy's Basketball Player of the Year as a reader-voted award ahead of the high school basketball season. The program belongs to the sports vertical and uses a plain public-vote mechanic: the paper publishes a ballot of nominated players and its readers decide the answer. Voting runs through Crowdsignal, the poll.fm service, and the ballot for the program sits at https://poll.fm/14692466.

The ballot's title puts the question directly to readers, asking who the paper's preseason player of the year should be. The 2024 round carried a poll closed notice once voting ended, which is how the Crowdsignal page marks a finished round. Since every nominee on this ballot is a minor in the paper's high school coverage, this page names the publisher, sport, gender and season instead of any player.

For a supporter or a family following the award, the practical picture is short: a local paper, a list of county players, and a public vote whose result feeds the paper's preseason basketball coverage. The essentials of the Beaver County Times program are gathered in the table underneath.

The dated record for the preseason award

Two preseason rounds of this award are confirmed, one in 2023 and one in 2024, marking the program as a recurring fixture in the paper's sports calendar rather than a single experiment. The 2024 edition's voting window fell in November, with the ballot live inside that month ahead of the winter season. Both rounds were carried on the same Crowdsignal ballot address the paper uses for the preseason question.

The paper leaves the ballot's opening and closing dates, any category roster, and the next edition year off its published pages; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the paper does publish around the vote is the practical frame: the preseason round belongs to November, the result is reported through the paper's sports desk, and the ballot closes at a time the paper announces in its own coverage. For a supporter planning around the award, the November placement matters more than any anniversary date, because it fixes the push to the weeks before basketball season begins in Beaver County schools.

No nomination round separate from the vote is described for this program, and the paper does not publish a standing schedule page for the preseason award the way it does for its in-season coverage. The gap is worth knowing before promising anyone a date.

How a supporter votes on the preseason ballot

Voting takes little more than a minute. The supporter loads the ballot at https://poll.fm/14692466, where the preseason player of the year question sits at the top of the Crowdsignal page. Beneath it, each nominee is listed with a grade level, a position and the Beaver County high school the player attends, so a reader can locate a specific player or scan the county field by school.

Voting is a single selection: pick the choice next to the chosen nominee, press the vote control, and the Crowdsignal page logs the selection and shows the running result. The organizer's published coverage of the preseason vote states that "Supporters can cast votes for their favorite players as often as they wish, with the voting closing at noon on Tuesday, December 2." That sentence is the paper's own description of the frequency rule and the close time for the round it covered.

The ballot page prints no sign-in requirement, and the paper describes no eligibility restriction on who may vote, which fits a county paper inviting its whole readership to take part in a preseason feature. The 2024 round ended with a poll closed notice on the ballot, the standard Crowdsignal state once a window has passed.

For anyone supporting a player, the sequence is therefore: open the ballot, find the player, vote, and return as often as the paper's rule allows until the announced close.

Where this ballot sits among Pennsylvania sports votes

Beaver County's preseason award is unusual in Pennsylvania sports voting because it is a county paper's preseason feature rather than a state-wide or weekly series. Several sibling programs cover the same state from different angles: Mr. PA Football is a state-level football award, the PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week runs week by week inside a conference, and the Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week takes a statewide weekly football audience.

Other neighbours move the vertical rather than the geography: the Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year is a spring-sport year award, the Morning Call Athlete of the Week is a Lehigh Valley paper's weekly series, and the WICU Athlete of the Year is an Erie television station's annual honor.

What distinguishes the Beaver County Times ballot is timing and scope: it asks one preseason question about boys basketball in a single county, it runs in November before the season rather than during it, and its nominee list is drawn entirely from Beaver County schools. A supporter deciding where to spend attention should match the program to the season, because a preseason county vote rewards early organization in a way a weekly in-season poll does not.

Strengthening support in the preseason county vote

This ballot rewards early, repeated support more than a last-day surge, for a reason specific to its rules: the organizer's coverage allows supporters to vote as often as they wish, so a school community that returns daily through the November window compounds an advantage no single-day push can match. The printed close time is the hard edge, and it arrives at midday, which catches supporters who assume an end-of-day deadline.

The practical playbook for a Beaver County player's supporters is to share the poll.fm ballot link directly through the school community, name the player and the school in every post so supporters find the right choice on the list, and set a reminder around the noon close. General tactics for public high school votes, including how supporters organize repeated voting, are covered in the votes guide, and the options for award-style ballots specifically are on the award votes page. Whatever route a supporter takes, the paper's own published rules for the preseason vote are the standard the ballot enforces.