BFP Boys Volleyball Preseason Player of the Year Ballot: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in the BFP preseason ballot and why it exists

This ballot speaks to Vermont's high school boys volleyball community: players, families, classmates and the readers who follow varsity sports in the state. It is a preseason exercise, meaning it asks supporters to name a player of the year before the season has been played, based on reputation, prior form and program strength. That timing shapes who takes part. Preseason ballots draw the committed followers of a sport rather than casual readers, and in a state with a compact boys volleyball scene, the schools named on the ballot, including programs in Burlington, South Burlington, Essex and Mount Mansfield, are the communities doing the voting.

The organizer is BFP, and the vote is carried on a Crowdsignal page, the poll.fm service, at poll.fm/15929799. The mechanic is public-vote: anyone loading the ballot can review the nominee list and submit a choice. There is no nomination round printed on the preseason ballot, no entry fee and no paid tier. The table underneath sets out the program's fixed details.

Because the ballot is preseason, its result is a statement about expectations rather than a championship. That distinction matters to supporters: a strong preseason showing builds attention for a program heading into the fall, which is why school communities treat the late-August window as worth organizing around even though no trophy is decided by it.

Which editions and dates are confirmed for this ballot

Confirmed runs for this program fall in 2022 and 2025. It is treated as annual, and the 2026 cycle carried a preseason voting window that opened on Tuesday, Aug. 25 and closed at 9 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 31, according to the organizer's own coverage of the ballot. That makes the preseason vote a late-August fixture in the years it has been confirmed, arriving just before the fall season begins.

The gap between the 2022 and 2025 confirmations is worth stating plainly: the published trail for this ballot is uneven, and no year-by-year list of every edition between those two has been printed anywhere the organizer maintains. What the 2026 window shows is that the program was active in the most recent cycle, with the ballot page itself now marked as closed.

On what the organizer has not published: BFP prints no category roster, no cap on submissions and no eligibility rule on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Future window placement is likewise unpublished. The 2026 dates are the latest confirmed window, and nothing ahead of the next preseason indicates whether late August will hold.

For supporters planning around the program, the practical reading is this: expect a preseason window in August in years the ballot runs, watch for the organizer's coverage when the season approaches, and treat the poll.fm page as the only source of live dates. The closed status printed on the current ballot is not a sign the program has ended, only that the 2026 window has passed.

How a supporter casts a vote on the live ballot

Voting takes little effort. A visitor loads poll.fm/15929799 while the window is open, reads the list of nominees, picks one and submits. Each nominee is presented with the school the player represents, so a backer from Essex, Burlington, South Burlington or the Mount Mansfield program can find their own side quickly. No account creation, nomination form or separate entry step appears on the preseason ballot.

The ballot page also prints the running tally, which is unusual and useful. On the latest closed edition, the printed result showed the leading nominee at 41 percent of 13,358 votes, with the runner-up at 25 percent of 7,989 votes. Because Crowdsignal displays the tally on the page, supporters can watch the standings move during the window instead of waiting on an announcement.

Rule text is absent from the ballot. There is no printed statement about how many submissions one person may make, whether returns on separate days count separately, or who qualifies to join in. A visitor who wants to vote more than a single time should follow whatever the live page permits at the moment, since the organizer has not published a written policy to point to.

Timing adds a second practical constraint. The 2026 window ran six days, from Aug. 25 through 9 p.m. on Aug. 31, which is a short span for a preseason ballot. Supporters who learn about the vote late in that span have little room to act, which is why the schools and families behind each nominee tend to push early in the window instead of holding back for a last-day rush.

How this ballot sits beside Vermont's other fan votes

This ballot is not the only public vote in the Vermont high school sports space. Six sibling programs share the market, each carrying a different publisher and a separate route on this site: the Caledonian-Record Athlete of the Week, the Vermont Softball Breakout Player of the Year, the Vermont Varsity Insider Boys Athlete of the Week, its Fall Football edition and Spring edition, and the Vermont Varsity Insider Girls Athlete of the Week.

What separates the BFP preseason ballot from those neighbors is timing and scope. The athlete-of-the-week programs run during a season and reset weekly, while this ballot is a single preseason question asked once before the fall begins. It covers boys volleyball specifically, a sport with a smaller statewide footprint than football or softball, which concentrates the voting base in the programs that field teams, including the Burlington, South Burlington, Essex and Mount Mansfield communities named on the ballot.

The host platform is also a point of difference. This ballot sits on a Crowdsignal page at poll.fm, while other Vermont fan votes belong to different publishers and setups. For a visitor, that means the voting experience here is a single-page select-and-submit poll with a printed tally, and the ballot URL stays stable at poll.fm/15929799 across editions rather than moving with each new season.

A supporter weighing where to put effort will find the comparison straightforward: this ballot rewards a concentrated push inside a short August window, while the weekly programs reward sustained attention across a season. Both patterns are visible across the sibling pages, and each program's own ballot page remains the authority on its rules and dates.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this preseason vote

The window here is short and the voting base is school-sized, so effective support in this ballot looks like mobilization, not volume. The nominees represent identifiable school communities in Burlington, South Burlington, Essex and Mount Mansfield, and those communities are where the votes are. Families, teammates and program alumni reached early in the Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 span carry more weight than a late push, since the printed tally on the Crowdsignal page lets everyone see where a nominee stands in real time.

The organizer has published nothing about outside assistance in this poll, so supporters should keep any effort inside what the live ballot permits and avoid assuming a limit that is not printed. The general tactics that apply to short-window fan polls, from timing to reaching a roster's own network, are covered in our guide to getting more votes online, and the award-specific context is in our award votes overview. What no page can promise is an outcome: the tally on poll.fm is the only result that counts, and it reflects whatever the ballot registers before it closes at the printed hour.