Post-Crescent Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who runs the Football Player of the Year vote

The Post-Crescent, a Wisconsin newspaper published online at postcrescent.com, runs the Football Player of the Year ballot as one strand of its prep football reporting. Readers face a single question on it: which player deserves the paper's football player of the year title. It is a reader-decided award, meaning the result comes from whoever visits the ballot and casts a vote, not from an editorial panel or a jury of coaches.

Crowdsignal, the polling platform that powers poll.fm addresses, carries the balloting, and the program's voting address is https://poll.fm/14561196. That page is where the newspaper places the question, the nominee options and the result tally once an edition closes.

Facts at a glance

The nominee pool comes from the newspaper's own coverage area. Schools that appeared on the 2024 ballot include Xavier, Neenah, Kimberly, Wrightstown, Freedom and Fox Valley Lutheran, placing the program squarely in Wisconsin school football rather than professional or collegiate sport.

Confirmed editions and the 2024 result

Just two editions are confirmed for the program, 2023 and 2024. Both were carried on Crowdsignal under the same newspaper branding, and both were settled within an October voting window, so the calendar shape of the award is a fall ballot rather than a winter or spring one.

The 2024 ballot is now marked closed on its page, and the closing tally is displayed beside it. The winning nominee, a player from Freedom, finished with 26,202 votes, a 35 percent share of the total cast. That figure makes the 2024 edition a heavy-turnout prep poll in the state's media landscape and shows the kind of mobilization a school community can produce when the title is on the line.

Just as relevant is what the ballot page omits. The publisher has printed no open or close dates beyond the October window, no list of supporting categories, no per-supporter voting limit and no eligibility text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The newspaper has also not announced whether a 2026 edition will run or on what date it would open, so the next cycle is readable only from the publisher's own pages once a new poll appears.

How a supporter votes on the ballot

Voting follows a deliberately plain sequence. The supporter loads the Crowdsignal page at the voting address, sees the newspaper's player of the year question at the top, and underneath it a vertical list of options. Each option is a nominee paired with his school, so the choice is made by selecting the radio button beside the player being backed and then submitting the poll. No newspaper subscription, account creation or email entry appears as part of the flow.

In the 2024 edition the options drew from schools including Xavier, Neenah, Kimberly, Wrightstown, Freedom and Fox Valley Lutheran, giving Fox Valley readers a ballot that mirrors the local matchups they follow all season. Because the options sit side by side, a supporter backing a smaller program should verify the school name beside the nominee before submitting, since the list does not group players by school or conference.

Right now the page shows a closed notice, which means the 2024 edition has ended and submissions are no longer accepted. That closed state is worth understanding: a vote cast on a closed poll goes nowhere, so timing matters as much as reach. When the newspaper posts a fresh ballot for a new season, the same sequence applies, open the page, pick a nominee, submit, with any changes to the flow printed on the new ballot itself.

Where this ballot sits among Wisconsin media votes

The Post-Crescent's player of the year award is a season-capping, single-winner ballot, which sets it apart from the weekly series that dominate Wisconsin's reader-vote landscape. The same publisher also runs the Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week, a recurring weekly format. Elsewhere in the state, 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) each answer to their own publisher.

Two further neighbours round out the picture: the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week and the Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week, the latter covering a different sport altogether. None of these share a ballot with the player of the year vote, and a nomination or vote cast on any of them carries no weight toward this award.

What makes this program distinctive in that crowd is the combination of a once-a-season window, a single football question and a nominee pool drawn from a specific cluster of Fox Valley schools. A supporter planning a push needs to treat it as a short, concentrated campaign in October, not a rolling weekly effort, and to source every date and rule from the live ballot rather than from a neighbouring program's page.

Strengthening support for a player of the year nominee

Because this is a free public poll with no published vote-frequency rule, the dependable path for a nominee's supporters is reach, not repetition: get the poll.fm link circulated through the school community while the October window is open. Parent groups, the team's own accounts, booster communications and local pages tied to the named schools are the channels that moved the 2024 tally so high for the Freedom nominee.

The organizer has not published any position on outside help for this program, so nothing on the ballot either permits or prohibits purchased support. That gap matters: whatever a supporter decides, the honest reading is that the newspaper's own terms, when it eventually prints them, govern the result. The commercial options for award ballots are described at buy award votes, and anyone weighing them should first read the ballot's own text in the live window.

The practical takeaway for a Fox Valley school community is to plan around the short window rather than the mechanic: share the ballot early in October, name the nominee and school in every share so votes do not land on the wrong option, and keep checking the page for the open or closed state.