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

What the Fond du Lac Reporter/Oshkosh Northwestern Volleyball Player of the Year Poll is

What follows documents a high school volleyball fan vote published for the Fond du Lac and Oshkosh, Wisconsin market. The organizer behind the vote is the Oshkosh Northwestern, a Wisconsin newspaper whose sports coverage runs at thenorthwestern.com, and the ballot title carries the Fond du Lac Reporter masthead alongside it. That double name reflects how the publisher covers both communities from one sports desk rather than pointing to two separate contests with two sets of rules.

The vote itself is a Player of the Year honor: instead of naming an athlete of the week across all sports, the publisher stages a single fan ballot devoted to volleyball at the end of the fall season. The ballot options are area high school volleyball players, each listed beside her school, and readers decide the winner entirely by vote. The nominee slate is not reprinted here, since the roster changes with each edition and the players are students.

Crowdsignal, the polling platform behind poll.fm, hosts the ballot at https://poll.fm/14636959. The format is the simplest one the platform offers: one question, a list of radio-button options, a Vote button, and a live tally after submission. The table below gathers the core facts a supporter needs.

The dated facts for this volleyball poll

This fan vote has two confirmed edition years, 2023 and 2024. That pair is what qualifies the program as an annual fixture in the publisher's sports coverage: the Oshkosh Northwestern has staged the poll in consecutive fall seasons, and the run already covers two falls, with the November voting month lined up against the close of the Wisconsin high school volleyball calendar. No edition year after 2024 has been published anywhere by the organizer, and no first-run or inaugural claim belongs to this page because the program's history spans more than a single season.

The publisher's own volleyball coverage supplies the most specific dating this program has: an article on thenorthwestern.com devoted to the poll states that it stays open until noon on Thursday, Aug. 20. That is a single-cycle deadline tied to that season's story, not a standing rule, so treat it as an example of how narrowly the publisher dates each round rather than a permanent close date.

Equally relevant for planning is what the publisher has left unprinted. No category roster appears on the ballot, and no announcement names a future edition year; a supporter planning for the next season should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. A nomination round is likewise unstated, since the publisher's article describes only the voting phase and says nothing about how the slate is assembled before the poll goes live.

How a supporter votes on the volleyball ballot today

Voting here takes little effort. The supporter loads the ballot page on poll.fm, which presents one question listing this season's volleyball nominees, each paired with her school. One option is chosen, and pressing the Vote button registers the choice. Crowdsignal confirms the submission at once and reveals the tally, so the poll doubles as a live scoreboard for the rest of its window.

One rule governs repeat voting. The publisher's volleyball coverage states it plainly: "The poll will be open until noon on Thursday, Aug. 20, and votes are limited to one per hour per device." The hourly, per-device limit is the only voting rule the organizer has printed for this ballot. In practice it means one person can back a player repeatedly across the window by returning once an hour from the same phone or laptop, and a household can multiply that by using separate devices.

Because the ballot sits on Crowdsignal rather than on thenorthwestern.com itself, nothing about the vote requires a newspaper subscription, an email address or an account. The poll page is the whole experience: arrive, choose, submit, and check back as the tally moves. If the ballot shows a closed notice, the current edition has ended and the next one has not yet been posted.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

This poll is one of several reader votes in the same Wisconsin high school sports scene, but its shape is unusual among them. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week, the Green Bay Press-Gazette Cellcom Athlete of the Week, the La Crosse Tribune Supernova Athlete of the Week and the Racine Journal Times Athlete of the Week (Supernova) are all weekly series that rotate across sports year-round. The Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week is the closest neighbour in geography, yet it too runs on a weekly cycle rather than as a single seasonal honor.

Two differences set the volleyball Player of the Year poll apart. First, it is sport-specific: volleyball only, staged at the end of the fall season, which concentrates the whole voting community into one short window instead of spreading it across the year. Second, its scope is one award for the whole season instead of a rotating slate of weekly honorees, so the entire audience votes on one question with one winner.

The other single-sport comparison in the state is the weekly basketball vote from Bound Wisconsin, though it covers a winter sport and runs weekly through its own season. For supporters of area volleyball players, the practical takeaway is that this ballot's November window is the one moment in the year when the Fond du Lac and Oshkosh fan community decides a year-end volleyball honor by public vote. The neighbour pages above cover the other public votes a household in this market is likely to encounter.

Strengthening support within this poll's own rules

The honest lever in this poll is its hourly per-device rule. Because the publisher has stated that votes are limited to one per hour per device, a campaign's reach depends on how many people and devices it can move repeatedly across the window, not on any single burst of votes. That favours early, steady organizing: pass the ballot link around to teammates, families and school communities as soon as the poll goes live in November, and remind voters to return each hour while it stays open.

The organizer has printed no further rules for this ballot, so an effort that simply mobilizes real supporters on the stated schedule stays inside everything the publisher has published. For a broader picture of what works in fan votes of this kind, the page on getting more votes online walks through outreach patterns that fit an hourly-limit ballot, and award vote support is covered separately for readers weighing that route.