Connecticut High School Boys Lacrosse Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Fairfield County holds the ballot — and it knows it

Connecticut's spring lacrosse landscape is not evenly spread across the state. It bends hard toward the southwestern corner. New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich, Fairfield Ludlowe — these programs compete in the FCIAC and SCC, two conferences that routinely send teams deep into the CIAC tournament, and their fan bases know how fan votes work. When a Darien or New Canaan player makes the SI ballot, the poll link travels fast through networks that have run this drill before.

The May 5, 2025 field illustrated the concentration. Six of the eleven nominees came from Fairfield County or its immediate orbit: Boden Farmer of Greenwich (4G, 4A vs Trumbull), Grey Wildman of New Canaan (4G including a double-overtime game-winner against Iona Prep), Levi Perkins of Darien (4G, 3A in a 24-0 win over Westhill), Mason Neely of Fairfield Ludlowe, Austin Tuttle of Brunswick, and Ryan Diaz of Canterbury. The other five came from Cheshire, Sheehan, Bacon Academy, East Lyme, and St. Bernard — programs spread across the rest of the state, outside the Fairfield County lacrosse belt. The geographic split is the map of Connecticut lacrosse in a single week.

That matters for how campaigns run. A Fairfield County supporter understands that the same families who attend games are the ones voting on Sunday morning. The booster networks are active, the alumni bases are dense, and the programs have enough institutional memory that someone usually posts the poll link before noon on Monday. The challenge for a nominee from Bacon Academy (Colchester) or East Lyme is different — geographically farther from the lacrosse belt, but not without their own tight-knit communities. Finn Bruno of East Lyme was on that ballot after scoring 5G and 3A in an 18-2 win over Fitch. East Lyme draws on a smaller pool. Whether it turns out at the same rate is a question of organization, not geography.

What the May 5, 2025 ballot actually showed

No winner has been publicly confirmed for any 2025 Connecticut Boys Lacrosse POTW week — SI does not publish a winner archive separate from the ballot articles. What the record does show is who made the field and what they did.

The May 5 nominees, with their confirmed stat lines:

Three things stand out. First, Beau Rutkowski's 11-point game is the highest confirmed single-game output in the public 2025 nominee record — six goals and five assists. That kind of performance earns a nomination, but Sheehan is not an FCIAC program, and Sheehan fans are competing against communities that have been voting in this poll for years. Second, Joey Grenier's goalie nomination is notable because goalies appear on the ballot against high-scoring field players and voters have to consciously choose a defender. Third, Austin Tuttle was a freshman when he logged a hat trick against nationally-ranked Staples for Brunswick. That is a genuinely unusual circumstance — it is hard enough for an upperclassman to make this field, let alone a freshman at a school playing a nationally recognized opponent.

None of the outcomes are confirmed. The takeaway from this field is scale: 11 nominees, most with strong stat lines, across programs spanning the state. A campaign that does not start early in the week is not competing against these programs — it is trailing them.

How Sunday's close shapes a spring lacrosse campaign

The Connecticut Boys Lacrosse poll closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. That is the same close day as the girls lacrosse and softball polls SI runs for Connecticut — which means spring-sport families in Connecticut may be tracking two or three open ballots simultaneously if their kids play multiple sports. A lacrosse campaign running Monday through Saturday has a full week to build a lead before casual voters arrive Sunday.

SI posts the new ballot once the editorial staff has compiled the weekend game results — typically early in the following week. The window is roughly six days. A campaign that gets the link circulating in team group chats on Monday is voting into an essentially empty field; by Saturday the race has taken shape and the gap is harder to close from behind.

The FCIAC programs' advantage here is partly geographic concentration. A family in Darien whose son is nominated can send the link to parents they see at practice Tuesday. A supporter of a Bacon Academy or East Lyme nominee does the same thing, but the physical community is spread differently — Colchester and East Lyme are not next to each other, and their fan networks are not interlinked the way Fairfield County's are. That structural difference does not make a campaign impossible; it makes early outreach more important, not less. For teams that want additional reach before Sunday night, structured vote-support campaigns exist for open, uncapped weekly polls like this one.

For how recurring SI fan polls work across the cadence, the how-to guide covers the general mechanic. More Connecticut fan votes — including the Connecticut football POTW — are at /usa/connecticut/; the full national directory is at /usa/.