Maryland High School Softball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Maryland High School Softball Player of the Year?

The Maryland High School Softball Player of the Year is a girls-softball-specific annual honour published by High School on SI — Sports Illustrated's prep-sports vertical, operated by the Arena Group at si.com/high-school/maryland. The award is distinct from the broader multi-sport Player of the Year poll: this ballot covers softball only, drawing nominees from across the MPSSAA spring season and recognising Maryland's top pitcher, slugger, or two-way standout in girls softball.

• Nominees are drawn from MPSSAA public schools (Classes 1A–4A) across all 24 Maryland jurisdictions, plus private-school standouts from the WCAC (Washington Catholic Athletic Conference).
• The softball-specific poll goes live once per year, published by the High School on SI editorial desk after the MPSSAA spring softball championship concludes — typically in late May or early June.
• Voting is free — no Sports Illustrated subscription or Arena Group account is required to cast a vote from any device.
• The winner is decided purely by fan vote total; the editorial desk sets the nominee slate but does not influence the final result.
• The 2026 ballot features nominees Racheal Howell (Huntingtown), Rylan Crisafulli (Broadneck), and Ava Chadwick (St. Mary's Ryken), with voting closing Sunday, June 21, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
• This award is separate from the weekly Maryland Softball Player of the Week polls that run throughout March–May; the POY ballot honours the full season's elite performance.

Because this poll is softball-specific and annual rather than weekly, the supporter base is narrower — softball families, coaches, and boosters — which means a focused school network mobilising early in the window can swing the result decisively.

Recent Maryland Softball POY nominees and winners

High School on SI has run the Maryland Softball Player of the Year vote for multiple consecutive spring seasons. The table below lists confirmed nominees and winners from recent years based on published SI.com voting articles — no results are fabricated or estimated.

Patterns across the nominee pool

Several consistent patterns emerge from reviewing the nominee slates. Calvert County's Huntingtown programme appears repeatedly — the Hurricanes have been MPSSAA 2A state champions multiple times in recent seasons (2025 and 2026 confirmed), and their pitchers have been among Maryland's most statistically dominant. Southern Maryland's Leonardtown (Class 4A, St. Mary's County) and the Montgomery County public schools — Churchill, Walter Johnson — represent the state's most populous softball corridors outside Calvert. WCAC private-school nominees like St. Mary's Ryken reflect the increasingly competitive Catholic-school softball scene in Charles and Prince George's counties.

Which Maryland softball schools and regions produce POY nominees?

The Maryland Softball Player of the Year ballot reflects the geographic spread of the state's strongest girls softball programmes — from the Southern Maryland counties to the Baltimore suburbs and Montgomery County. The table below maps the key schools and regions that consistently produce nominees.

Southern Maryland — the tri-county corridor of Calvert, St. Mary's, and Charles counties — punches above its weight in this award. Huntingtown and Leonardtown both compete in MPSSAA seasons with fewer large schools than the Baltimore or Montgomery County corridors, yet their pitching programmes have produced statewide-leading strikeout totals and multiple state titles. The concentration of softball talent in Calvert County in particular — a county of roughly 100,000 residents — is one of Maryland's most notable prep-sports stories of the 2020s.

How does voting for the Maryland Softball POY work?

The Maryland Softball Player of the Year vote uses the same High School on SI poll widget deployed across all of Sports Illustrated's state-level prep content. It appears as a standalone article on si.com/high-school/maryland with an embedded voting module listing each nominee's name, school, and a brief statistical summary. For a general primer on how online fan-vote polls of this type function, see our overview of online contest voting.

Voting is entirely free and requires no account. Any visitor to the poll page can cast a vote without registering with Sports Illustrated, subscribing to the Arena Group, or providing personal information. Live vote percentages for each nominee update throughout the open window, so supporters can track standings in real time and decide when to activate additional outreach.

The poll deadline is stated on the active voting article — in 2026, that deadline is Sunday, June 21, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Because this is an annual poll rather than a rolling weekly one, the window may be open for one to two weeks after publication, giving supporters significantly more time to build sustained outreach than a standard weekly poll allows.

To locate the current poll, navigate to si.com/high-school/maryland and search for "softball player of the year" — the article title follows the pattern "Vote: Who Should Be the Maryland High School Softball Player of the Year for [Year]?" For the how-to mechanics of navigating and voting, see the voting how-to guide.

How do you build votes for the Maryland Softball Player of the Year?

Winning a statewide annual award draws more voter activity than a typical weekly poll — but the playing field is also smaller. The nominee pool is softball-specific, which means the natural supporter base is parents, teammates, coaches, and softball-community contacts rather than a school's entire student body. Every mobilisation effort should be channelled toward that core community first.

Who to activate, and how

The most reliable Maryland-specific vote-building channels for a softball POY campaign:

• The softball programme's parent and booster network: Direct message or email with the exact poll link, athlete's name, and the June 21 deadline. A single well-framed message to a 40-family booster email list outperforms a generic social post reaching three times as many people.
• Teammates across the full varsity roster: Encourage every player to vote using their own device each day the poll is open and to share the link within their own contacts.
• County-level softball organisations and travel leagues: Southern Maryland Travel Ball, Anne Arundel County recreational leagues, and Montgomery County softball clubs all have parent networks that respond to local recognition stories — reach out directly to organizers.
• Social media posts naming the full context: Posts that read "Vote for [Name] of [School] in the SI.com Maryland Softball Player of the Year poll — link below" convert significantly better than vague "go vote" messages. Include the closing date.
• Local Maryland sports media: High school sports reporters at Southern Maryland News Net, The Capital (Anne Arundel County), and the Frederick News-Post cover prep softball closely — a story noting a local nominee's candidacy can reach readers who would not otherwise see the poll.

Because voting has no stated hourly cap (unlike some weekly newspaper polls), a sustained daily reminder campaign throughout the full open window tends to outperform a single-push approach. Activate the closest network on day one; broaden to the softball-community tier on days two and three; hit the deadline reminder on the final day.

When organic outreach has reached its natural ceiling and a gap remains in the standings, some families and booster programmes use a paid vote promotion service to reach additional real voters at scale. For details on how that works for annual sport-specific awards like this one, see our sports fan poll service. The key is using a service that adds genuine, paced votes — not bot-generated traffic that gets removed by the platform.

Rules, fair play, and the buy-votes question

The Maryland Softball Player of the Year poll is a free reader-engagement fan vote hosted on Sports Illustrated's prep platform. There is no cash prize, no formal sweepstakes under Maryland prize law, and no MPSSAA involvement in the award itself — it is entirely an SI editorial programme. The relevant restrictions are those of the poll widget's platform terms, which generally prohibit automated scripts and bot-generated traffic that circumvents the platform's native submission controls.

The meaningful distinction is between two fundamentally different types of activity:

• Automated scripts and bot traffic — high-volume requests generated by software that bypasses the platform's native controls. These violate standard poll terms, produce detectable traffic anomalies, and result in vote removal.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — real people casting votes on their own devices through a legitimate promotional channel. Structurally, this is the same as a booster club email reaching five hundred additional families — fans voting, reached by a different method.

Whether the second category satisfies the spirit of SI's specific contest terms is a judgement each campaign must make after reading the current active poll page. For a detailed, balanced treatment of the legality and ethics of paid vote promotion across online polls generally, see our guide. The context here — a free newspaper-style editorial award with no prize and no formal contest law framework — is similar to most regional prep-sports fan polls. Weigh the recognition value of a statewide softball POY credential against that context honestly.

Maryland Softball POY season timeline

The Player of the Year poll is anchored to the MPSSAA spring softball season calendar. Understanding where the award fits in that calendar helps supporters plan outreach, understand nomination timing, and confirm when the active voting window opens.

The window between MPSSAA state championships (late May) and the poll closing deadline (typically early-to-mid June) is short — often just two to three weeks. Supporters who act in the first 48 hours after the ballot is published typically set a lead that is difficult to close in the final push. Waiting until the last day to begin outreach leaves no time to correct a deficit.

For the full Maryland high school sports and voting contest landscape — including other annual awards, community polls, and the weekly athlete polls — visit the Maryland contest hub. For all US-based contest guides, the USA guide index covers all 50 states.