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

What the Lakeshore Elite preseason volleyball vote is

This program is a fan-voted award for high school volleyball in Wisconsin. The organizer is Lakeshore Elite, and the vote runs on Crowdsignal's poll.fm, with the current ballot at poll.fm/15888922. The mechanic is a plain public vote: supporters reach the ballot page and choose directly among the named nominees, with no separate entry step in front of them.

Although the organizer name sits in the program title, the ballot reads like a community poll rather than a club-only exercise. Its nominees carry class years and school names from across the Lakeshore region of eastern Wisconsin, the shoreline corridor between the Two Rivers and Sheboygan areas. Schools named on the ballot include Manitowoc Lutheran, Oostburg, Reedsville and Sheboygan Falls, and the towns tied to the program in the region's voting footprint include Two Rivers, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Sheboygan Falls, Kohler and Mishicot.

The vertical is sport, and the award is a preseason recognition: it runs ahead of the fall volleyball season, in August, which is when each edition of the vote has taken place. That preseason slot is what separates this program from athlete-of-the-week polls that run all season long. The table below collects the page's core facts.

Editions and the August window: what is confirmed and what is not

The Lakeshore Elite poll has three editions behind it, in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Those years are the basis for treating the program as annual, and the pattern is consistent enough to treat the preseason vote as a fixture of the Wisconsin volleyball calendar rather than a one-off. The most recent edition is the 2025 ballot, and the natural next step is a 2026 preseason edition on the same poll.fm address.

One dated fact anchors every cycle: the vote happens in August of each edition year, opening and closing inside that month. The 2024 and 2025 ballots both ran in August, and the 2023 edition fits the same preseason slot. A preseason award has to finish before the fall season starts, which is why the August placement holds across the confirmed years.

Several facts never appear next to the ballot. Lakeshore Elite has never printed the day the August vote opens or the day it closes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The page also carries no written rules text of any kind, so the nomination method, any per-supporter cap and any eligibility conditions sit entirely outside what the ballot shows. Platform-side round dates are equally absent: there is no published schedule of when the August tally closes or whether any lead-up round precedes the final count. A supporter who needs certainty about a closing day has to watch the ballot itself, because the organizer has not chosen to print a timetable.

How a supporter votes on the Lakeshore Elite ballot today

Voting takes only a few moves. A supporter opens poll.fm/15888922, sees the Lakeshore Elite Preseason Volleyball Player of the Year ballot, and picks one nominee from the list. Every nominee is identified the same way: a first name and surname, a class year such as sr. or so., and a school. On recent editions that meant players from Manitowoc Lutheran, Oostburg, Reedsville and Sheboygan Falls, with nominees ranging from sophomores to seniors.

After the selection is made, the vote is logged on the page and the tally updates. Crowdsignal ballots show a running percentage beside each option, and when a poll closes the final split stays visible. That is how the 2025 edition's result remained readable after voting ended: the closed ballot kept the leader's percentage on display, so supporters who missed the August window could still see the outcome.

Three practical notes come out of that setup. First, the ballot is a single page, so there is no nomination round or separate entry form to clear before voting. Second, whether an account is required is not printed anywhere on the page, and no registration step is described, so a supporter should expect to vote straight from the ballot. Third, the same address serves each edition, which means an out-of-date ballot can look live; check the headline for the current year before sharing the link with teammates and volleyball families.

Where this ballot sits among Wisconsin's public votes

Wisconsin has a dense field of fan-voted sports programs, and most of the neighbours this ballot keeps are newspaper-run athlete-of-the-week polls. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week, the Green Bay Press-Gazette Cellcom Athlete of the Week and the La Crosse Tribune Supernova Athlete of the Week all run weekly cycles during the school year under media mastheads.

The Lakeshore Elite poll is different in three ways. Its organizer is a volleyball program, not a newspaper, so the ballot covers a single sport and a single region rather than every athlete in a circulation area. Its cadence is annual rather than weekly: one August vote per year, as the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions show, instead of a fresh ballot every seven days. And its host relationship is direct on Crowdsignal's poll.fm rather than inside a publisher's own contest platform.

Other Wisconsin neighbours for comparison include the Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week, the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week and the Racine Journal Times Athlete of the Week (Supernova). What a supporter gains from this ballot is focus: one sport, one Lakeshore community, one short August window in which the whole region's volleyball attention concentrates on a single poll.

Strengthening support inside this ballot's short window

The August window is the defining constraint of this program, so every push has to be compressed into a few weeks. The most effective honest tactic matches the ballot's shape: a single poll.fm page, a visible percentage tally, and a community of volleyball families already connected through Manitowoc, Sheboygan and the towns between them. Send the Lakeshore Elite ballot address to people the day the new edition appears, name the player and school so supporters know who they are backing, and repeat the ask while voting is open, because a preseason vote competes with back-to-school attention rather than with in-season coverage.

Lakeshore Elite publishes no rules text on the ballot page, which means there is no stated allowance for outside vote services and no stated prohibition either; the organizer's silence is the fact a supporter has to plan around. Ideas that do not depend on rules you cannot see are the durable ones: school social accounts, team group chats and gym-community posts aimed at the Lakeshore volleyball base. The broader playbook is in how to get more votes online, and paid options are described separately at buy award votes if a campaign wants to evaluate that route.