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

What the Lakeshore Elite player of the year ballot is

Most Wisconsin fan ballots a supporter runs into are weekly newspaper features: an athlete of the week, reset every seven days, run by a publisher in Appleton, Green Bay, La Crosse or Racine. The Lakeshore Elite Girls Basketball Player of the Year award is built differently. It is a season-capping honor for one sport, girls high school basketball, and it is run by Lakeshore Elite, a basketball program in the Lakeshore region of eastern Wisconsin, not by a newsroom.

That difference shows up in the host. For its player of the year vote, Lakeshore Elite uses Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm addresses are a self-serve option many small programs pick, rather than a publisher's contest system. The 2026 edition sat at https://poll.fm/16861855 under the title Vote for the 2026 Lakeshore Elite girls basketball player of the year. The vote is free, public and single-choice, and no account or sign-in is mentioned anywhere on the ballot page.

The nominee pool is local. Players from schools in Oostburg, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Sheboygan Falls, Kohler, Mishicot and Howards Grove appear on the 2026 ballot, each listed with her school and class year, so the award functions as a season-long honor for girls basketball across that stretch of lakeshore Wisconsin rather than a single-school vote.

Facts at a glance

Editions confirmed and the 2026 window

Two editions of this award are on the platform: 2025 and 2026. The history reaches back further, because a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay student publication piece refers to a 2024 Lakeshore Elite girls basketball player of the year, so the award has now run at least three seasons. The 2027 edition is the next expected cycle, and Lakeshore Elite has not posted a date for it.

The 2026 window is the one dated fact the ballot itself carries. The poll was open one week, closing at noon on July 20, after which the page was retitled with a Poll Closed marker. That one-week shape matters for anyone planning support: the whole voting window is short, and a push that starts late has very little runway left.

Equally concrete is what the organizer leaves off the page. Lakeshore Elite does not print how nominees are selected, whether one supporter may vote more than once, or any eligibility rules for the award; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The nominee list itself is visible on the ballot, but the selection process behind it and any per-person voting limit are simply absent, so the live poll is the sole authority on those points.

How a supporter votes on the Lakeshore Elite ballot

The mechanic is as plain as fan voting gets. A supporter opens the poll.fm address for the current season, reads through the nominee list, marks the single-choice selector beside one player and presses the vote control near the foot of the Lakeshore Elite poll. No login is mentioned on the page, no email confirmation is requested, and the click registers on the Crowdsignal platform.

Two things follow from that setup. First, because the ballot is single-choice, a supporter backing a specific player should read through every name before clicking, since the display order is not a ranking. Second, the 2026 page is marked Poll Closed, so clicks on it now do nothing; support only counts during the open window, which for the 2026 edition ran one week to a noon on July 20 close.

No per-supporter vote limit appears on the ballot page, and Lakeshore Elite has not posted a daily return rule for this award, so the live page is the sole authority on that question. The same goes for write-ins: the 2026 ballot presents a fixed nominee list with school and class year attached, and no write-in box is mentioned on the page.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Set the Lakeshore Elite award next to its Wisconsin siblings and the contrast is immediate. 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 and the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week are all publisher-run, all-sport, weekly reset votes. The Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week shares this program's sport but still runs on a weekly rhythm.

The Lakeshore Elite ballot is the opposite on every axis a supporter cares about. It is run by a basketball program rather than a newspaper, it covers one sport and one gender, and it crowns a player of the year for a whole season instead of restarting every week. Its window is a single one-week sprint rather than a rolling series, and its host is Crowdsignal at poll.fm rather than a publisher contest system.

For a nominee's supporters, that means the playbook differs too. A weekly athlete of the week vote rewards showing up again each cycle; this award concentrates everything into one short window per season, so timing and early outreach carry more weight here than on any of the six weekly ballots around it.

Strengthening support in a one-week window

Because the Lakeshore Elite ballot compresses the whole vote into roughly one week, the useful moves are the ones that work fast. Pass the poll.fm link straight to teammates, classmates, family groups and local youth basketball circles on the day the poll opens, since a link that circulates on day one reaches far more supporters than one passed around near the noon closing time. The ballot needs nothing but a click, so every person who sees the link is one tap from counting.

On outside help, Lakeshore Elite has published no rule for this award about purchased or automated votes, and the ballot page itself prints none. That silence is not permission; it is a gap, and the organizer's own announcement for each season is where any statement would appear. For a grounded walkthrough of outreach methods that fit short-window public ballots, see our votes guide.