Fond du Lac Reporter/Oshkosh Northwestern Girls Basketball Preseason Player of the Year Poll: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the preseason Player of the Year poll is and who runs it

This preseason fan vote goes by the full name Fond du Lac Reporter/Oshkosh Northwestern Girls Basketball Preseason Player of the Year Poll, and the Oshkosh Northwestern runs it. That organizer is a Wisconsin newspaper publishing at thenorthwestern.com. The program carries a joint title that also names the Fond du Lac Reporter, and its coverage area is the Fond du Lac and Oshkosh region of the state. It belongs to the high school sports vertical: the ballot asks readers to pick a preseason Player of the Year for girls basketball before the season begins.

The ballot lives on Crowdsignal, the polling platform behind the poll.fm address. The edition from the most recent confirmed cycle sits at poll.fm/14669021. The format is a single-choice poll: each nominee appears with her name and her school, the reader selects one, and the running tally updates as votes arrive.

The nominee list draws on schools across the coverage area. Schools that have appeared on the ballot include Laconia, Lourdes Academy, Berlin and Central Wisconsin Christian. Because this is a high school poll, the description here stays with publisher, sport, season and school rather than naming any individual nominee.

Edition history and the November voting window

Two editions of the poll are confirmed: 2023 and 2024. Both fell in November, which fits the preseason framing, since Wisconsin girls basketball seasons get underway in the weeks after the poll closes. The most recent ballot page is marked as closed, meaning the 2024 edition has finished and no newer ballot was open when that page was last live.

What the organizer does not publish is the fine print of the schedule. No exact opening day or closing day is printed ahead of a cycle, and the next edition year is not announced in advance either. The organizer has not published exact window dates or the next edition year; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. In practice that means a backer hoping to take part should treat early November as the season to start checking the poll link and the newspaper's sports coverage.

That two-year run is the reason the program counts as annual instead of a single event. It is a short window by design: a preseason poll loses its point once games begin, so the ballot opens and closes inside a single month. Anyone planning support for a nominee needs to be ready when the window opens, because there is no long runway before the tally locks.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

Voting takes only a few steps. The ballot sits at poll.fm/14669021; a backer reads the list of nominees, taps the choice next to the player she or he wants to back, and submits the form. Crowdsignal logs the choice right away and the tally refreshes. No account, login or payment is part of the process as the ballot presents it.

The organizer's stated practice for these reader polls sets the pace of return visits: each device is restricted to one vote per hour. That rule, quoted from the newspaper's own poll coverage, means a committed supporter can vote more than once over the life of the poll but only at hourly intervals from the same device. Different family members on different devices each get their own hourly vote.

Because the ballot is a preseason edition, the window is short and the nominee list is fixed when the poll opens. There is no write-in box and no public nomination stage on the published ballot; the roster is already set. A supporter's job is therefore to be present during the November window and to use the hourly return the rules allow, rather than to influence who appears on the list.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

This poll is one of several reader-vote programs covering Wisconsin high school sports, and its closest neighbour is the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week, which comes from the same coverage area. The difference is cadence and scope: the athlete of the week ballot recurs through the season across sports, while this preseason poll is a single girls basketball question asked once, before the season starts.

Other programs in the state run on a similar publisher-poll model. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week and the Green Bay Press-Gazette Cellcom Athlete of the Week serve nearby Fox Valley markets, the Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week covers basketball statewide, and the La Crosse Tribune Supernova Athlete of the Week and Racine Journal Times Athlete of the Week (Supernova) serve their own cities.

What makes this one distinct is the combination of a preseason deadline, a single sport and a single gender. A weekly athlete of the week ballot gives a nominee a fresh chance every seven days; this poll gives a girls basketball player one shot in November to carry momentum into the season. That is why the short window matters so much to anyone supporting a nominee here.

Strengthening support inside this poll's rules

Support in this poll is built on repetition within the rules and on reach. The stated rule of one vote per device per hour rewards supporters who organize: a family that sets an hourly reminder during the November window, a team group chat that pings when it is time to vote again, or a school account that posts the poll link with the nominee's name will outperform a single push. Because the window is short, early momentum matters more than a late surge.

Reach matters because each supporter controls only one device's hourly vote. Asking the nominee's teammates, classmates and extended family to vote from their own devices multiplies the effort honestly. The organizer's own poll coverage states the hourly device limit plainly, so there is no ambiguity to exploit and no reason to risk a nominee's standing on anything outside the stated rules. For a fuller rundown of methods that fit a short fan poll, see our votes guide, and for the legal framing around paid vote support, the legality page covers the question directly.