Upstate Girls Soccer Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Upstate Girls Soccer Player of the Year is and who runs it

This program hands a Player of the Year honor in girls high school soccer to whichever nominee the Upstate region of South Carolina's fans vote forward. The organizer is listed simply as Upstate, the same name that fronts the program, and the balloting is outsourced to Crowdsignal, the polling service better known by its poll.fm addresses. That split matters to a supporter: the organizer decides who is nominated, while the platform decides only how the form behaves.

The ballot asks a single end-of-season question about which nominee deserves the honor, with no multi-category slate attached. Nominees on the 2025 ballot represented schools from the region, including Byrnes, Eastside, J.L. Mann, Mauldin and Riverside, all matched to South Carolina. Student nominees are deliberately not named here; the live ballot is where each name is printed beside her school.

Everything a first-time visitor needs sits in the table below.

The dated record: which editions ran and when the window falls

Two editions stand confirmed: 2022 and 2025. That pairing is why the program qualifies as annual in this reference, though the confirmed list is the whole of the published history. Nothing in the organizer's material names a starting year before 2022 or a ballot between those two years, so the safe reading is that the history begins where it begins.

The 2025 voting window fell in May, with the ballot open and then closing within that month. The Crowdsignal page for the 2025 edition now carries a closed status and displays the final split: the Byrnes nominee took 47% on 55,946 votes, the Riverside nominee 32% on 38,201, the Mauldin nominee 18% on 20,646, the Eastside nominee 2% on 1,931, and the J.L. Mann nominee 1% on 1,068. The spread between first and second place, 15 percentage points, is the margin any 2026 campaign would need to close.

Opening day and closing day for the next round appear nowhere in the organizer's published material; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Beyond that gap, no printed nomination window, category roster or round schedule exists for this award, so the poll.fm page is the only dated authority a supporter has.

How a supporter votes today

Few fan polls ask less of a voter than this one. The supporter heads to poll.fm/15438247 on Crowdsignal, sees the nominee list with a school beside each entry, clicks the option next to the preferred player, and submits. Crowdsignal then takes the vote and typically refreshes the page to show the running percentage for each nominee, which is how the tallies quoted from the 2025 edition became public in the first place.

Two practical points follow from that flow. First, the same URL serves the whole program: when a new edition launches, the new form replaces the closed one at that address, so a supporter who bookmarks poll.fm/15438247 will find whatever ballot is current. Second, because the 2025 form has closed, visiting today returns results rather than a voting box, and no amount of refreshing restores the form. Entering the poll.fm address directly into the browser is the reliable route, since a search listing may just as readily lead to a closed edition.

The organizer has published no rules about repeat voting, cookies, IP limits or daily returns for this ballot, and Crowdsignal's own per-poll settings vary from poll to poll, so the behavior of the live form is the only guide to how often a vote counts.

How this ballot sits beside its South Carolina neighbours

South Carolina carries a busy set of reader-voted sports awards, and this program is the only one dedicated to girls soccer in the Upstate. Its closest neighbours on this site are the Charleston Post and Courier Athlete of the Week, a newspaper-run weekly honor from a different market, and the South Carolina Mr. Football Reader Poll, which covers a different sport and gender entirely.

The remaining siblings round out the picture: the Football Hall of Fame Fan Vote, the Boys Basketball Player of the Week, the Defensive Player of the Year and the Baseball Player of the Week. Each answers to its own organizer and platform, so vote rules, windows and tallies differ from ballot to ballot even inside the same state.

What marks this program apart is its shape: a single end-of-season question about girls soccer, hosted on Crowdsignal, with a May window in its confirmed 2025 edition and a public final tally, where several neighbours run weekly cycles with rolling winners instead of a single annual verdict.

Strengthening support in this poll without risking the result

A campaign for this award works with narrow material: one nominee, one free ballot, and a Crowdsignal form with no published voting rules. The honest levers are turnout ones. The 2025 result shows a 15-point gap between the top two nominees, so a school community that mobilizes early, through team rosters, parent groups and social posts that point straight at the poll.fm address, starts from reach rather than guesswork.

The organizer has printed no statement on automated or purchased votes for this program, which cuts both ways: nothing published permits it, and nothing published defines the penalty. Because the ballot is free and open, legitimate reach almost always outperforms shortcuts in polls of this size, and it carries no eligibility risk to the nominee. For practical, rule-safe tactics that apply to fan ballots like this, see the votes guide, and treat the live ballot's own terms as final.