The Potomac Highlands Dispatch - the online newspaper

Pros and cons in online fan voting, overall awards selection process
* Lessons learned will be put to better future coverage

By Kevin Spradlin
The Potomac Highlands Dispatch
MOUNT SAVAGE, Feb. 25 -- Along with being the first area newspaper to offer video highlights and post-game interviews of high school basketball, PhDispatch.com - and you, the fans and readers - recently completed the area's debut in online fan voting.

The relatively modest goal of 1,000 votes was set - combined, for all four races: boys and girls player of the year awards, as well as boys and girls coaches of the year.

To receive 20,373 leaves PhDispatch.com staff and contributors breathless. You can see the breakdown to the right. However, those numbers beg explanation, as does the process itself. And PhDispatch.com wants to emphasize the overall awards selection standings for each category of voting may not directly reflect online fan voting. From the start, online fan voting was billed as 50 percent of the process. And so it is - no more and certainly no less.

This was an experiment. To our knowledge, online fan voting, that counted, had never been done in this area.

Overall, PhDispatch.com grades itself (before the results are known to the public) an A-. While there is room for improvement, it's a positive that eight of nine coaches among the area's boys varsity teams received votes and all nine coaches of the conference's girls varsity teams received at least one vote.

Spoiler alert: online voting for Girls Player of the Year was a landslide. We figured it'd be much closer. The great thing, though, is there is plenty of room for discussion and different opinions. Ten of 11 players on the ballot received at least five votes. Further still, there were 10 write-in candidates totaling another 236 votes. The number of votes for a write-in candidate ranged from one to 196 and was distributed among players from four teams in three (Hampshire, Allegany and Garrett) of the four counties that make up the AMAC.

Boys Player of the Year voting received more than 13,700 votes, including 488 write-in votes for 12 players from six teams and, again, three counties (Garrett, Allegany and Mineral). The number of votes for write-in candidates for this award ranged from one (five different players) to 386 (a Northern Garrett player).

Originally, 11 players from seven of nine AMAC teams were on the ballot. After Keyser's Wes Washington received a certain number of votes, we heeded a request to add his name to the ballot - thus showing we're receptive to your ideas. To be sure, both his write-ins and regular ballot votes are counted.

Overall, the Boys Player of the Year was not an easy decision - either in online fan voting (when subtracting more than 10,000 votes for a single player, more on that below) or on the part of PhDispatch.com staff and contributors. There was much discussion. The list was first at six players and later whittled to three. We felt obligated to pick one, and so we did.

However, like any good experiment, there were some elements of the online polls implemented for a variety of reasons. One element allowed voters to vote as many times as they wanted. The goal was to increase participation.

Another element - just as important - served as a safeguard, put in place to protect the integrity of the awards process. What we didn't want to happen was a student-athlete who wasn't, as discussed by PhDispatch.com staff and contributors, a contender, to receive a million votes.

That allowed us to make an exception - and it's an allowance of which we had to take advantage. One male player not considered in our preliminary top six contenders for an award received more than 10,000 of the 13,665 votes. Kudos to that person for having the support to garner such attention - or having a friend with the know-how to set up a program to continuously vote.

This is a good player - but not the best, at least in our collective mind. And as we learned about the survey technology, it was determined that maybe allowing an unlimited number of votes per IP address might not be the best thing. Maybe next time, it'll be one person = one vote. Of course, with technology, there are still loopholes around that data collection restriction.

With that lone negative, however, there were plenty of successes. The online fan voting polls drove traffic to new heights in both number of unique visitors and number of visitors since our launch on Dec. 7, 2010.

And plenty of the results were either pleasing, surprising, eye-opening or startling.

The great thing is the level of participation from around the four-county area that encompasses all nine Appalachian Mountain Athletic Conference schools.

Part of the reason online fan voting wasn't the only element in the selection process was an attempt to be fair. Market penetration by PhDispatch.com sports coverage seems to be greater in Garrett County and by fans of only certain schools in Allegany and Mineral counties.

That mirrored, mostly, PhDispatch.com's effort to be "on the list" of media outlets to call to notify us of game results on the occasions the game could not be covered. A huge thanks to Northern Garrett, Southern Garrett and Keyser boys basketball teams for including us in their thought process after a win or loss. On the girls' side, the Dispatch had help from Keyser, Northern Garrett consistently and, at times, Frankfort.

In addition, almost every coach and player from all 18 AMAC teams allowed practically unfettered access to game stats and time for post-game interviews without which Dispatch coverage would have suffered.

It's highly likely we modify but otherwise continue online fan voting for end-of-season awards in high school sports. It's quite probable we expand the use of such polls to continue to garner interest in the site. It's also rather likely you might see other media outlets in the area begin to use the power of the World Wide Web, as we now do, and encourage a high level of meaningful interaction through surveys and other methods.

It's been a fantastic first regular season with some great basketball, good competition, close games and sometimes shocking results. It must make you wonder: what do the playoffs have in store?