Herald Times Reporter Lakeshore Elite Preseason Wrestler of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Lakeshore Elite Preseason Wrestler of the Year?

The Lakeshore Elite Preseason Wrestler of the Year is a reader-voted honor presented by the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, the newspaper whose masthead sits above the program. The paper builds the nominee list from high school wrestling programs in Wisconsin, promotes the ballot to its readers and hosts the vote itself at poll.fm, the Crowdsignal polling address, where this program's ballot carries the identifier 14666102. Voting is free, takes place on a public web page, and involves no ticket, fee or purchase anywhere in the process.

Three traits define the contest's shape. The honor is individual, so the unit of competition is a single wrestler rather than a team, a business or a place. The label preseason points at the calendar, with past ballots anchored to November ahead of the campaign the nominees were about to wrestle. And the nominee pool is local and identifiable: the closed ballot listed wrestlers from Sheboygan Falls, Oostburg, Two Rivers, Plymouth, Kiel, Mishicot and Sheboygan, each entered with a class year beside the school.

When has the ballot run, and when does voting open next?

Two edition years stand behind the program's annual tag: ballots ran in 2023 and 2024. Both of those cycles centered on November, which fits the preseason positioning in the program's own name. The pattern makes the award a fall fixture for the paper's sports desk, timed to the stretch before wrestling resumes in earnest.

The newest cycle the paper promoted worked on a longer calendar. In promoting the Lakeshore Elite girls wrestling wrestler of the year, the paper told readers that votes would count until noon on April 17, and the closing date carried for that cycle is April 17, 2026. The poll.fm ballot that remains online now heads its page with the words "Poll Closed", and beneath that heading it displays final percentage standings for the field, with the leading nomination shown at 39 percent on 11,235 votes.

Beyond the wrestler-of-the-year question itself, the ballot publishes no category roster, no nominee eligibility terms and no per-supporter limit, and the next edition year is unannounced; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Until the paper posts a fresh ballot, its readers-choice sports coverage is the place where a new window and its deadline will surface first.

How does a supporter cast a vote in this program?

There is no app and no paywall between a reader and the ballot. Loading https://poll.fm/14666102 puts the nominee list straight onto the screen, each row giving a wrestler's name, class year and school. A supporter selects the wrestler backed and submits the choice, and the page acknowledges it at once. That is the whole act of participation: a single page, a list, a choice.

Since the ballot is nothing more than a standard browser page on Crowdsignal's poll.fm host, the same motions work from a laptop or a phone, and nothing in the ballot's presentation asks the reader to register before reaching the list. Two caveats matter right now. The linked ballot carries the words "Poll Closed", so a visitor today sees the final standings rather than a live form. And the paper has not posted a date for the coming window, so the practical move for a supporter is to follow the Herald Times Reporter's readers-choice coverage, where each new ballot arrives with its own deadline attached.

Readers who want the broader craft behind backing a nominee, from reminder timing to social reach, can study the site's guide to earning more votes online, much of which applies directly to a school-community ballot like this wrestler of the year race.

How does this ballot compare with other Wisconsin reader votes?

Wisconsin readers have no shortage of public ballots to answer. Sibling programs on this site serve the same state: Best of the Valley around Appleton, Best of Madison, the Best of Milwaukee Readers' Choice, the Eau Claire Reader's Choice Awards, Best of the Bay in Green Bay and Janesville CommunityVotes. Each of those is a wide catalog, inviting readers to sort local businesses and services into winners across a whole city or region.

The Lakeshore Elite Preseason Wrestler of the Year takes the opposite approach. Where the siblings spread themselves across many categories, this program concentrates on a single honor, and where they lean on the business community, this one leans on the wrestling mats of the small cities that supplied its nominees, from Sheboygan Falls and Plymouth to Kiel, Two Rivers, Oostburg and Mishicot. The organizer differs in kind as well: a newsroom putting a seasonal athlete honor to its readers, not an annual civic census.

That difference reshapes how support behaves on each ballot. A Best of-style ballot rewards breadth across dozens of answers, while this race rewards depth behind a single wrestler, which is why school communities rather than whole downtowns tend to be the engine of the count.

How can a school community rally support for its wrestler?

A nominee's strongest asset in this program is the community behind the school. Because the ballot groups each wrestler with a named school, supporters in Sheboygan Falls, Oostburg, Two Rivers, Plymouth, Kiel or Mishicot can rally around a hometown entry and pass along the exact ballot address, https://poll.fm/14666102, rather than leaving classmates to hunt for it. Timing matters too: November is the anchor month for past ballots, so families and teammates who want to be ready should follow the paper's sports coverage as the preseason approaches.

The ballot states no position on voting software or bulk submission tools, so any campaign that goes beyond ordinary sharing should read the organizer's terms before leaning on outside help. General outreach patterns for widening a supporter base are collected in the votes guide, and readers weighing paid support for an award-style ballot can review the landscape on the award-votes page. Whichever route a community takes, the paper's published rules for the live ballot govern what counts.