Daily News Fans Field Hockey Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

A season-closing award, not a weekly feature

Most high school sports fan votes in Massachusetts are weekly sprints, and that is the clearest way to place this program. Polls like the Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week or the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week post a fresh slate of nominees every cycle and close quickly. The Daily News Fans Field Hockey Player of the Year does the opposite: it gathers the season's field hockey nominees into a single ballot and lets the tally run until a Player of the Year is decided.

The organizer named for the program is Imperial Valley Press. The host platform is Crowdsignal, and the ballot stands alone at the poll.fm address poll.fm/16564714. That address is the ballot itself. The page title for the latest edition reads 2026 Daily News Fans Field Hockey Player of the Year, followed by a Poll Closed marker, which tells a visitor immediately that the current race has finished and the results are showing.

This program belongs to the sport vertical and works as a public vote: the nominated players and their schools supply the ballot options, and fans supply the votes. Its audience is Massachusetts high school field hockey. The edition years documented for it are 2023, 2025 and 2026, and that three-year pattern makes the program annual rather than a short-lived experiment.

The dated facts for this ballot

The confirmed edition years for the Daily News Fans Field Hockey Player of the Year are 2023, 2025 and 2026. Those are the years the program can be pinned down to a live ballot, and the gap pattern matters less than the recurrence: three editions across recent seasons, each tied to a January voting window. The two most recent poll.fm ballots are dated in January, spanning January 2025 through January 2026, which puts the voting period at the start of the calendar year following the fall field hockey season.

The 2026 edition is the most fully visible of the group because its results were published before the page was marked Poll Closed. The winning entry finished at 44 percent on 17,788 votes, and the runner-up took 24 percent on 9,755 votes. Those figures come straight from the tally shown on the poll page itself, and they are the only vote counts attached to this program.

Several facts sit outside that published tally. The exact open and close dates inside January have not been printed. No nomination round date has been posted, so whether players are nominated in advance or added directly to the ballot is not stated. No per-supporter limit, eligibility rule or category roster has been printed by the organizer anywhere on the ballot page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on this ballot

Casting a vote here asks almost nothing of a supporter. Opening https://poll.fm/16564714, the Crowdsignal address for the program, brings up a poll with a single question, and the nominated field hockey players are listed as answers, each shown with the school she represents. Choosing an entry and submitting the answer is the whole act of voting, and the running tally updates on the same page afterward.

Right now that page shows the 2026 edition with a Poll Closed marker, so a visit today displays the final standings rather than an open ballot. Nothing about a closed poll changes how the next edition will work; the sequence a supporter follows is to wait for the new ballot, read the answer list, select a player, and submit.

No account creation, login, or payment step is described on the ballot, and the poll accepts votes from any visitor while it is open. Because the program is annual and its ballots carry January dates, the practical habit for supporters is to check the poll.fm address once the fall field hockey season has finished and the new Player of the Year race has been posted. There is no separate nomination form to find and no secondary platform to register with.

How this ballot sits among its Massachusetts neighbours

Massachusetts is well supplied with fan-voted school sports programs, and this page's siblings show the spread. The Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week are recurring weekly honors, and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week follows the same rhythm in its own sport.

This program differs from that pattern in three ways. It is field hockey only, so the ballot never mixes sports. It is a Player of the Year award rather than a weekly honor, meaning the vote measures a whole season and closes with a definitive result. And its host platform is Crowdsignal at poll.fm, with the ballot standing alone at a single address rather than running inside a rotating series of pages.

It also differs from the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year, another player-of-the-year format in the state, because that program is organized around a national award brand while this one is a publisher-run fan poll. Anyone deciding where to focus support should note the practical difference in timing: weekly polls reward fast, repeated pushes, while this award rewards broad support built across the January window while the single ballot stays open.

Strengthening support for a nominee here

Support for a nominee in this program works differently from a weekly poll, because the ballot stays open through a January window instead of resetting every few days. That favors steady outreach: teammates, classmates, and family networks can be pointed at the same poll.fm address over weeks, and each visitor who submits adds to a cumulative tally rather than a short sprint. On this ballot the organizer publishes nothing about outside help or vote sources, leaving supporters no stated rule to weigh beyond the plain public-vote format itself. What can be said is what the format rewards: reach, repetition, and getting people to the actual ballot before the Poll Closed marker goes up. The methods that hold up across fan polls of this kind, from social pushes to community group coordination, are gathered in how to get more votes online, and they apply to a season-long field hockey tally better than tactics designed for short weekly votes.