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

The gap between Morgan and Wilton on the same ballot

Emma Tuener of Morgan won the Connecticut Girls Lacrosse Player of the Week. That fact is worth sitting with for a moment, because Morgan is not one of the programs that appears at the top of CIAC lacrosse conversations. The following week's ballot — May 12, 2025 — included Wilton, New Canaan, and Trumbull, three of the most decorated programs in Connecticut girls lacrosse. Morgan's Emma Holecz was also on that ballot.

What Tuener's win confirms is something the football POTW also shows on the SI platform: enrollment, conference prestige, and state ranking do not gate the result. The SI ballot puts a small shoreline program and a Fairfield County power on the same list, and the one whose community organizes around Sunday's close wins. That is not a quirk of the platform — it is the design.

The nine nominees on the May 12 ballot stretched from Wilton in Fairfield County to Ledyard in the east to Wolcott in the Naugatuck Valley — essentially the full width of Connecticut girls lacrosse geography. No confirmed vote totals exist; SI does not publish them. What exists is the nine-player field, the confirmed previous winner from a mid-sized program, and the Sunday 11:59 p.m. close. Those three facts shape every campaign consideration that follows.

How the spring lacrosse field differs from what the football poll looks like

The Connecticut football POTW runs the same platform — same SI host, same embedded widget, same unlimited cap — but the lacrosse poll is not simply a spring reskin. A few real differences shape how campaigns run.

The football ballot draws primarily from larger programs and runs through a fall season where Fridays dominate. The girls lacrosse ballot runs April through June, on a schedule where midweek games can produce the stat lines that make the ballot. A standout Tuesday result that reaches the editors by the weekend can earn a nomination; football's ballot is built from Friday-night outcomes. That changes when you know a strong game is coming and when to flag it.

The close is the same — Sunday — and that is the thing most voters get wrong. There is no Monday reprieve here. The football poll's Connecticut equivalent closes Sunday too, so anyone who plans their final push for Monday has already lost.

The geography and communities behind the ballot

The May 12 field is the cleanest picture of how Connecticut girls lacrosse distributes across the state. The Fairfield County programs (Wilton, New Canaan, Trumbull, and Foran just to the east) are always present as contenders; Darien, another name listed among the state's powerhouses, did not appear that week but shows up in other seasons. Then there are the eastern Connecticut programs — Ledyard, East Lyme — which draw from communities where lacrosse has grown steadily over the past decade. And then there is Wolcott, a Naugatuck Valley school that put goalkeeper Alexandria Bard on the ballot with 18 saves.

Each of those communities activates differently. Wilton and New Canaan carry large parent and alumni networks in Fairfield County — high absolute numbers, but those networks are diffuse and slower to move in concert on a single poll link. Ledyard and Morgan are smaller schools where the lacrosse community is a tighter circle and a well-timed Sunday morning reminder lands with higher per-person conversion. Tuener's Morgan win suggests the tighter circle performed better that week than the wider ones.

That is not a permanent structural fact — it is a weekly one. The community that understands its own shape and plans its push accordingly wins more consistently than the one that assumes its name recognition does the work. See the full Connecticut directory at /usa/connecticut/ or browse all state contests at /usa/.

Running a campaign before Sunday night

Two things matter for this poll: getting your player nominated, and moving the right people to the ballot before 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Sunday.

For nomination, the article on si.com/high-school/connecticut is the only confirmed submission channel visible for this poll. The football POTW lists a specific editor contact; the girls lacrosse poll's process is to check the current week's article for any nomination guidance the editors include. A game that ends Tuesday with a nine-goal, eight-assist output should be flagged to the editors promptly — waiting until Saturday reduces the window significantly.

Once the ballot is live, Sunday is the contest. The poll closes Sunday night, which means Sunday afternoon is when casual supporters are most likely to click a link they see in a parent group or team chat. The vote is uncapped, so returning through the day helps — but widening the circle matters more than deepening it from a single device. For a broader look at how weekly fan-vote campaigns run, the how-to guide covers the recurring cadence. Because this is an open poll decided entirely by how many real supporters you reach before Sunday's close, structured vote support exists for exactly this format. With nine nominees typically splitting the field, even a focused push in the final hours can shift the outcome.