April 16, 2026 by Keith Raynor in Livewire, Opinion
Each season, Ultiworld staff submit a ballot of the best players in the D-I Men’s and D-I Women’s divisions, counting up the votes to rank who they think are the top athletes. From wily vets to buzzy breakouts to rising rookies, we comb the rosters and plant our flags.
Our final rankings also take into account ballots from college players and our subscribers. These ballots will close Monday, April 20 at 1 PM ET.
Participant Ballot
To be eligible, you must be a current player or coach for a team that qualified for the 2025 D-I College Championships or has been ranked in our Top 25 Power Rankings during the 2026 season. Your participation is anonymous beyond Ultiworld management.
D-I Women’s Div. Subscribers
D-I Men’s Div. Subscribers
Non-subscriber votes will not be counted.
We have simplified this year’s additional ballots: pick your pool of top level players (minimum 15, maximum 35) and then you can drag and drop them into the order you like. Be careful not to click through too fast, as the survey is not editable once it has been submitted.
We use the following prompt:
If you were starting a college team today with the singular goal of winning a theoretical D-I Championship this May, how would you rank the players within the division? You aren’t building a team of all of your selections, so don’t worry about how the players complement each other. Consider each pick the first pick of a team, drafting in order, only you can’t pick the players you’ve already ranked above. With regards to injuries and absences, we will include all rostered players unless there is confirmation a player will not be competing, or would not be able to compete, at Regionals and/or Nationals.
In order to improve how representative our rankings are of the opinions of our voters, we have iterated until arriving at this process. We each listed out our top 35 players to iron out some of the gradations on the fringes and then combined our lists to create a composite ranking. In addition, we included the ballots of a few anonymous elite players and coaches from different teams and regions. We used a weighted scoring system for votes, with roughly a 6-2-1 staff-participant-subscriber ratio for points, scaled to account for volume.1
We reserve the right to exclude any ballot for any reason.
Our experience has shown that participants’ ballots trend towards regional concentrations and emphasizing the strength of their teammates, as well as other quirks such as occasionally not ranking themselves, which is why their ballots are weighted in this manner. ↩
