The Lakeshore Elite Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Lakeshore Elite Player of the Year ballot is

Lakeshore Elite organizes the Football Player of the Year as a fan-voted award for high school football, and the Crowdsignal ballot that carries it lives at poll.fm/16403967. The program draws its nominees from the Lakeshore region of eastern Wisconsin, and the communities represented on recent ballots include Manitowoc, Two Rivers, Plymouth, Sheboygan Falls, Kiel and New Holstein.

The award is a player-of-the-year format rather than a weekly honor: one senior football nominee class, one ballot, one winner decided by fan votes. The most recent closed ballot showed a clear front-runner, with one nominee holding 44 percent of the tally on 10,731 votes, a margin wide enough that the runner-up field split the remainder.

Facts at a glance

Because the organizer is a regional football organization rather than a newspaper, the ballot carries no publisher masthead and no sister categories. Everything a supporter needs lives on the single poll.fm page, which is also where the closed tally stays visible after voting ends.

The dated trail for this Wisconsin football poll

Two years carry confirmed editions of this program, 2023 and 2025. The 2025 ballot fell in December, which makes late-year voting the pattern the published years support. Whether an edition ran in the years between those two is not stated in any published material from the organizer, so the honest reading is a recurring award with an incomplete public trail.

The current cycle adds one dated fact: the organizer's published note says the preseason ballot accepts votes until noon on Aug. 20. That close date comes from Lakeshore Elite's own promotion of the poll, and it is the only day-level date attached to the program.

Three things the organizer has not printed are worth naming. The exact open date for each ballot is absent, so a supporter cannot tell when a new Player of the Year vote goes live without checking the ballot itself; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The category list is also absent, since this is a single-award ballot with no published breakdown of how nominees are chosen. And the platform's round dates, the nomination and voting phases other Wisconsin polls publish, go unannounced for this program.

For planning purposes, treat the December pattern from 2025 and the Aug. 20 preseason close as the two anchors, and expect everything else to move.

How a supporter votes in the Lakeshore Elite poll today

Voting takes little effort. A supporter loads poll.fm/16403967 in a browser, reviews the list of senior football nominees, picks one and submits. The page asks for no account, no email and no login, so the entire action fits inside a minute on a phone.

The one rule that shapes strategy is the organizer's published limit: votes are restricted to one per hour per device. That means a single supporter can legitimately return every hour until the ballot closes at noon on Aug. 20 in the current preseason cycle, and a family with several phones effectively multiplies its reach. It also means a last-minute push has less effect than it would on a one-vote-only ballot, because every hour a nominee trails is an hour of recoverable votes.

After the close, the poll.fm page flips to a Poll Closed state and keeps the tally visible beside each nominee. That is how the 44 percent, 10,731-vote result from the most recent edition stayed public, and it is the easiest way to gauge how competitive a new ballot is likely to be.

One caution: because the limit is per device rather than per person, clearing browser data to vote more often sits outside anything the organizer has addressed, and the published rules offer no guidance on it.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Wisconsin carries a long list of fan-voted sports ballots, and most of them belong to newspapers. 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, the Racine Journal Times Athlete of the Week (Supernova) and the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week are all publisher-run weekly honors spanning many sports.

The Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week is the closest structural cousin, since it is also a player-of-the-week format tied to one sport and one platform family.

The Lakeshore Elite ballot differs on three axes. Its organizer is a regional football organization, not a media company, so there is no article driving traffic to the vote. Its scope is one sport and one season-ending question, naming the player of the year, rather than a rolling weekly series. And its geography is tight: Manitowoc, Two Rivers, Plymouth, Sheboygan Falls, Kiel and New Holstein, the Lakeshore corridor, rather than a metro area or the whole state.

For a nominee's supporters, that tightness matters. A smaller, football-only electorate means every hourly vote moves the percentage needle more than it would on a statewide newspaper poll.

Strengthening support in a one-per-hour football poll

This ballot's hourly device limit rewards rhythm over bursts. A campaign built around the Lakeshore Elite Player of the Year should schedule returns across the day, assign each household device its own voting slot, and keep the Aug. 20 noon close visible to everyone helping. Because the electorate is a handful of Lakeshore communities, a single team's parent group and student section can plausibly reach most of the active voters.

Lakeshore Elite has published no stance on outside vote help, so the only written constraint is the one-per-hour-per-device rule itself. Anything that respects that rule is within the printed framework; anything that circumvents it is unaddressed territory. Before spending money or effort on third-party support, read how to get more votes online and the legal overview at is buying votes legal, and weigh them against award-vote specifics.

The cheapest lever remains the one the ballot hands you: hourly returns from every device a supporter controls, started early rather than in the final day.