The Oshkosh/Fond Du Lac Preseason Football Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Oshkosh/Fond du Lac preseason football player of the year ballot is

This ballot poses one question to high school football readers in the Oshkosh and Fond du Lac area of Wisconsin: which area player deserves the preseason player of the year title before the fall season gets under way. Crowdsignal hosts the balloting through poll.fm, the same host behind a family of Wisconsin sports polls, and the confirmed voting URL is poll.fm/15916177.

The nominee list is what gives the ballot its local shape. The most recent edition drew players from communities across the region, including Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Berlin, Mayville, Waupun and Oakfield, listed by name, school year and home town. That spread of small-city and small-town schools is the signature of this market: the poll is not a big-city metro award but a regional one that treats Berlin or Oakfield as equals of Oshkosh itself.

What separates this programme from the weekly athlete ballots in the same state is scope and rhythm. A weekly award resets every seven days and moves across every sport; this one concentrates on football, runs once in the preseason, and stays open long enough for a whole community to rally. The table below gathers the points a supporter can rely on.

The dated record: editions, the August window and what is not published

The published history of this ballot holds exactly two edition years, 2023 and 2025. That pair is enough to qualify it as an annual fixture in the Wisconsin preseason calendar, but it is also the whole published history. No first-run year is stated anywhere on the ballot, and no edition between those two is confirmed, so the honest reading is a programme that ran in 2023, ran again in 2025, and can be expected around the same point in the calendar afterward.

The window itself sits in August. The most concrete dated fact attached to the ballot is its close: the poll was open until noon on Tuesday, Aug. 18, per the promotion that carried the vote. That gives supporters a fixed deadline to plan around, and it explains the preseason framing, since a noon Aug. 18 close lands just before Wisconsin high school football weeks begin in earnest.

Several facts sit on the other side of the line. The ballot does not print the date voting opens, the full nominee roster for the coming preseason, or any eligibility notes for who may be nominated; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The organizer also publishes no statement about how nominees are chosen or whether a nomination round precedes the vote. Those gaps are normal for a poll.fm ballot, which usually exists as one question and one answer list rather than a full contest hub, but they mean the live page is the only source a supporter should trust in August.

How a supporter votes on the preseason football ballot today

Voting takes three moves. A supporter loads the ballot at poll.fm/15916177, sees a list of area high school football nominees, picks one, and submits the form. Crowdsignal registers the selection at once and displays the running share for every option, which is why the result table on the closed poll shows each nominee's percentage of the total. No login, no entry form and no nomination step stands between a reader and a counted vote.

The one published constraint is the hourly rule: votes are limited to one per hour per device. In practice that shapes how a campaign behaves. A family sharing one tablet can vote once an hour together; a student with a phone and a laptop has two devices in play; a supporter who remembers only on Friday night has lost nothing except the hours already gone. Because the platform counts by device, the rule is enforced by the form itself rather than by any moderator.

The current state of the ballot matters too. The latest poll is marked closed, which is the normal condition of a preseason vote outside its August window. A closed poll still shows the final standings, so it remains useful as a tally of who won and by what share. When the next preseason edition loads, the same URL carries the live form, the fresh nominee list and the same hourly limit, and the submit button works again without any new account or registration step.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin siblings

Wisconsin has an unusually dense grid of public sports votes, and this programme is the preseason football specialist within it. The nearest neighbour by name and market is the Oshkosh / Fond du Lac Athlete of the Week, which shares the market but runs weekly and across all sports rather than once a preseason and for football alone. A reader who follows both will notice the difference in rhythm immediately: one resets every seven days, the other builds toward a single August close.

The wider siblings show the same state at different scales. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week and the Green Bay Press-Gazette Cellcom Athlete of the Week are newspaper-backed weekly ballots in neighbouring Fox Valley and northeast markets. The La Crosse Tribune Supernova Athlete of the Week and the Racine Journal Times Athlete of the Week (Supernova) carry the weekly format to the state's western and southeastern corners, while the Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week applies the player-of-the-week idea to a winter sport statewide.

Against that field, this ballot's identity is concentration. One sport, one question, one preseason window, and a nominee list that reaches into towns like Berlin, Mayville, Waupun and Oakfield that the metro dailies rarely put at the centre of a ballot. For a supporter in this market, it is the football-specific vote, and the August close is what makes it feel like a season opener.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this preseason poll

Because the ballot allows one vote per hour per device, the strongest honest campaign is a scheduled one. Supporters who set an hourly rhythm during the August window, and who recruit each family member's phone as a separate device, turn the published rule into steady gains without touching the limit. Sharing the poll.fm link directly, in team group chats and on the booster club's pages, is what moves a small-town nominee up a results table that updates in public.

This poll's organizer publishes nothing about outside help, so the working assumption should be the strictest one: anything the Crowdsignal form would not count as a normal hourly vote is not worth the risk to a nominee's standing. For readers weighing paid support, the service options are described on the award votes page, and the honest framing applies here as everywhere: no vote package from any seller can promise victory in a public poll that turns on turnout.