Gainesville Sun Preseason Boys Lacrosse Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gainesville Sun preseason boys lacrosse poll is and who runs it

Run by The Gainesville Sun, the daily newspaper serving Gainesville, Florida, whose newsroom publishes at gainesville.com, the Preseason Boys Lacrosse Player of the Year is a reader-decided award for high school lacrosse. The poll recognizes boys lacrosse players before the spring season begins, which is what the preseason label in the title signals: the paper asks readers to judge the field ahead of play rather than after a completed campaign. Whichever nominee holds the most support when the ballot closes finishes on top, with no newsroom panel involved in the outcome.

Crowdsignal hosts the ballot, and the confirmed address for the program is https://poll.fm/15175056. The 2025 ballot carried the title VOTE: Gainesville Sun Preseason Boys Lacrosse Player of the Year and gained its closed marker once voting ended. Nominees on that ballot appeared alongside the high school programs they represent, all inside the paper's Gainesville coverage area in Florida.

Program facts at a glance

Since the program is a newspaper poll rather than a governing-body award, the nominee slate is simply what the paper publishes for each edition. Readers file no separate nomination form, and no criteria are published beyond the preseason framing in the title itself.

The dated facts: which editions ran and when the window falls

Two editions of the preseason boys lacrosse poll are confirmed: 2022 and 2025. The 2025 ballot was live during March, which fits the preseason timing the program's name promises, and the poll page now carries a closed marker with the final tally underneath. On that ballot, the leading nominee finished with 37% of 6,058 votes cast, a result showing the poll drew a genuinely engaged voting base in the Gainesville market, not a handful of padded submissions.

That two-year spread is what makes the program annual instead of a one-off experiment: The Gainesville Sun brought the preseason lacrosse poll back after its 2022 run, and the 2025 edition followed the same shape. No ballot for 2026 has been announced, so the next edition is expected but unscheduled in anything the organizer has printed.

Several details sit outside what the paper publishes. The Sun has never printed the precise open and close dates of the preseason lacrosse window, the nominee roster for any future edition, or a per-supporter voting rule of any kind; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Platform-side round dates are likewise absent, since the paper promotes the poll through its own sports coverage, not through any published contest calendar.

How a supporter votes in the Gainesville Sun preseason lacrosse poll today

The mechanic on the confirmed ballot stays deliberately simple. Voting starts at the poll.fm address the paper publishes, where the list of preseason boys lacrosse nominees The Gainesville Sun has chosen is laid out; the supporter selects the radio button next to the chosen player and presses the submit control beneath the nominee list. The tally refreshes the moment Crowdsignal accepts the submission, so the effect of the vote is visible immediately. No nomination form, essay or photo upload stands in front of the vote; the paper has already settled the slate, and the reader's only job is to pick from it.

The 2025 edition of the ballot is closed, so the confirmed URL now displays a finished result rather than an active poll. Voting there is finished, and any further submission would land on a ballot the paper has already sealed. When The Gainesville Sun publishes its next preseason lacrosse poll, that edition will sit on a fresh poll.fm ballot carrying the same select-and-submit mechanic, so the sequence a supporter follows will look the same then.

The format carries two practical consequences. Nothing on the ballot asks for an account or a login, so little stands between a supporter and a vote, and the tally sits in public view, so supporters can watch the standings move while the window is open. Both traits are common among the newspaper polls Crowdsignal hosts, and both make the preseason lacrosse ballot easy to share with a school community during the March voting period.

Where this ballot sits among Florida's other player-of-the-week polls

The Gainesville Sun preseason lacrosse poll works as a market award: it belongs to one newspaper's coverage area and honors a single sport ahead of the season. The neighbouring programs in the same Florida contest directory are mostly Central Florida player-of-the-week series, which run to a different rhythm entirely. Those include the Central Florida Flag Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Baseball Player of the Week and the Central Florida High School Boys Basketball Player of the Week.

The same directory also carries the Central Florida High School Football Player of the Week, the Central Florida High School Girls Basketball Player of the Week and the Central Florida High School Girls Flag Football Player of the Week. Those polls refresh weekly through their sports' seasons, while the Gainesville Sun program is a preseason award holding a single window each March.

What separates the two for a nominee's supporters is timing. A weekly series hands a nominee a fresh ballot every few days, so missing one week costs little. The preseason boys lacrosse poll concentrates its entire voting life into a short March window on a single ballot, so a school community hoping to influence the result has to organize around that window instead of a rolling schedule. The organizer, The Gainesville Sun, sets the slate and seals the ballot on its own timetable.

Strengthening support for a nominee in the preseason lacrosse poll

Because this Crowdsignal ballot asks only for a select-and-submit click during the March window, all the support a nominee receives comes from people completing that same action. The pushes that work best for a newspaper poll put the ballot link where the school community already looks: team group chats, the lacrosse program's parent network and the accounts the school itself runs, each with a line noting that the poll ends when The Gainesville Sun ends it.

The organizer prints no statement on the ballot page about outside assistance, paid promotion or automated voting tools, so there is no published rule either permitting or banning them for this program. The published element is the tally itself, which counts submissions without distinguishing where they came from. A supporter weighing options can read how support campaigns get built for polls of this kind in how to get more votes online, and the award-vote specifics sit at buy award votes. Whatever route a community takes, the March window is brief and the paper seals the ballot on its own schedule, so timing matters as much as reach.