Who should be the Caller-Times High School volleyball player of the year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The award, the paper and the platform behind it

This award is the Caller-Times's fan-voted honour for high school volleyball in its Texas coverage area. Rather than handing the decision to a panel, the paper opens the question to whoever cares enough to click: readers, families, classmates and the wider following each nominated player carries. The balloting runs on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm domain hosts the form, and the live address for the award sits at https://poll.fm/15902902.

Every option on the form is a real volleyball player, listed with a class year and a school. The schools sit in communities the paper covers: Taft, Beeville, Rockport-Fulton, Aransas Pass, Refugio, Portland, Agua Dulce, Kingsville and Robstown. That footprint spreads across the Coastal Bend's smaller cities and towns rather than clustering in one large metro, and it defines the audience. The people most likely to vote are those with a stake in a particular nominee, alongside the paper's general high school sports readership.

Because the format asks one question instead of spreading across several categories, the supporter's task stays simple from start to finish. There is no jury stage, no separate nomination form and no secondary question described on the page. The table below gathers the programme's fixed details.

Which editions are on record, and when the window falls

Two cycles of this award are documented: 2023 and 2025. Both placed their voting inside August, which makes late summer the dependable anchor for anyone following the programme. The pattern qualifies as annual, and a 2026 return is the natural expectation, though the paper has not announced a launch date for the next ballot ahead of the season.

Just as telling is what the form leaves out. No precise opening or closing date appears for the current cycle. No roster of categories exists; the player-of-the-year question stands alone on the form. No rules text addresses how frequently a person may vote or who qualifies for the list. The platform side is equally quiet, with no round dates published for the poll.fm ballot in advance. Anyone who needs those specifics has to read the form during the season and confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Quiet pages are common for newspaper fan polls of this size, but the gap carries practical weight. A supporter who builds plans around a deadline is building them around a date the organizer never stated, so the workable habit is to check the form itself once the paper's award coverage begins. The 2023 and 2025 cycles remain the full extent of the programme's documented history.

Casting a ballot on the poll.fm form

The supporter's job breaks down into a short sequence. The form at https://poll.fm/15902902 opens straight onto the question, with the options listed directly beneath it. Each option carries a class year and a school, so someone from Taft, Beeville or any other community on the list can find their player by scanning for the school name. Picking the radio button next to a nominee and submitting completes the act, and Crowdsignal then displays the running tally.

Nothing on the form describes a write-in option, a second category, an account requirement or a login. The programme is a one-question poll, which keeps every ballot concentrated on the same group of players. The paper has also published nothing about how frequently a person may vote, so anyone intending to return another day should rely on whatever wording the form shows at that moment rather than on habits picked up from other newspaper polls.

Hosting on Crowdsignal rather than on the paper's own site gives the ballot the standard poll.fm experience: a plain page, a list of options, a submit control and a results view. That consistency is why a single voting address serves the award across its editions.

Where this volleyball ballot fits among Texas fan votes

Several fan-voted high school sports programmes operate across Texas, and the neighbours frame what makes this one distinct. The Austin American-Statesman Athlete of the Week and the DFW Star Local Media High School Athlete of the Week run as recurring weekly honours tied to their own metros. Football drives the CenTex High School Football Player of the Week, the Dallas / North Texas High School Football Player of the Week and the East Texas High School Football Player of the Week, each anchored to its own region.

Set against that company, the Caller-Times programme separates on three points. The sport is volleyball, not football and not a general athlete honour. The question is a player-of-the-year call rather than a weekly nod, so the window compresses into the August stretch instead of stretching across a fall season. And the market is the paper's own Coastal Bend territory, with nominees from Taft, Kingsville, Robstown, Portland, Agua Dulce, Rockport-Fulton, Aransas Pass, Beeville and Refugio, rather than the large metros the other ballots serve.

Scale is the practical takeaway. A smaller-community ballot places a nominee's fate in the hands of a tighter network of families and hometown followers, which is why organized local outreach shifts results here more than it would on a metro-wide weekly poll.

Rallying support for a nominee on this ballot

With a single-question form compressed into an August window, useful support looks like concentrated hometown outreach: the player's family, teammates, student body and town followers asked directly to open the poll.fm page and vote while the form is live. The paper has published no rule on outside voting help for this award, so nobody can say in advance how such votes would be treated, and the form's own terms are what govern.

What a supporter controls is reach. Sharing the voting address through school channels, timing posts for when local followers are online, and making each ask specific, with the player's name and the voting link in the message, all work inside a plain public poll. The fuller playbook for fan ballots of this kind, including which outreach methods hold up on Crowdsignal-style forms, sits in how to get more votes online. Anything past organic outreach carries rules risk that only the organizer's terms can settle, so read those before relying on it.