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

Who votes and who runs the Daily News Fans Football Player of the Year

The Daily News Fans Football Player of the Year asks Massachusetts high school football supporters to pick a single player of the year through a fan poll. Imperial Valley Press runs the program under the Daily News Fans name, and the ballot lives on Crowdsignal (poll.fm), a polling platform that hosts the vote and publishes the standings when the window closes.

The audience is town-based. The nominee list pairs each player with the community behind him, and the towns carried on the ballot read like a map of the state's high school football corridor: Westborough, Ashland, Holliston, Milford, Bellingham, Wellesley, Hudson and Maynard all appear, with some nominees attached to school communities such as Maynard/AMSA and Algonquin. That structure is why turnout in this program is a local project as much as a statewide one, since each nominee arrives with a ready-made base of classmates, families and town followers.

The vertical is sport and the format is a plain public vote: no entry fee, no judging panel, no nomination round for supporters to work through. The ballot is the whole program. Everything a supporter needs, from the nominee list to the final percentages, sits on the single poll.fm page.

The dated record: editions, the February window and the 2025 results

The edition years attached to this program are 2023 and 2026, which is why the program counts as an annual fixture rather than a single poll, and the recurrence pattern points to a next expected run in 2027. The voting window for the live cycle falls in February. Between those bookends, the poll.fm page itself carries a 2025 edition under the title "2025 Daily News Fans Football Player of the Year", marked closed.

That closed 2025 ballot left published numbers behind, and they are the only figures attached to this program. The leading nominee finished at 39 percent on 8,522 votes, the runner-up at 35 percent on 7,554 votes, and the third-place finisher at 14 percent on 3,013 votes. A gap of roughly a thousand votes separated the top two, which shows how tight a town-versus-town turnout race can get on this ballot.

What the organizer has not printed matters just as much. Imperial Valley Press has not published the precise open and close dates of the February window, a category list, or any cap on repeat voting; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Platform round dates for the series are likewise absent, since no promotion carrying them is attached to this market. The practical consequence is that supporters planning a push should treat the poll.fm page, not a calendar entry, as the source of truth for when the current edition opens and closes.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

The mechanic is deliberately plain. A supporter opens poll.fm/16616055, and the current edition of the player of the year poll loads directly, with no account creation, no email verification and no separate nomination form standing in front of the vote. The page presents the nominee list in a plain poll format, each option carrying a player's name beside the town or school community he represents.

From there the action is a selection and a submission. The supporter picks the nominee he or she wants to back and submits the poll, and Crowdsignal logs the choice on the spot. Because the nominee list pairs names with towns, the most useful habit before submitting is checking that the town attached to the option matches the community you intend to support, since neighboring towns in this corridor can share similar program names.

Two parts of the mechanic are left open by the organizer. Whether one person may come back and cast again, and on what schedule, the ballot page leaves unstated. The same is true of any eligibility rule about who may take part. Both questions resolve to the live page: if the current edition carries a repeat-voting or eligibility rule, it will appear there, and if it does not, the single submission is the complete action. When the edition closes, the same page flips into a results view showing the final percentages and raw vote totals, which is how the 2025 standings became public.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts neighbours

Massachusetts carries a crowded slate of fan votes for high school sports; this program occupies a distinct slot in it. Where the weekly athlete-of-the-week ballots reset every seven days, the Daily News Fans Football Player of the Year is a season-capping award: a single February window, a single question, and a result that names a player of the year rather than a week's standout.

The nearest neighbours in shape are the weekly programs. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week both run recurring short windows under their own publishers, and the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week, the baseball player of the week and the basketball player of the week ballots cover other sports on the same weekly rhythm. A supporter mobilizing for this football poll can borrow turnout tactics from those programs, but the calendar and the stakes differ.

The closest cousin by award type is the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year, which is also a player-of-the-year honor, though it sits in a different sport and a different selection tradition. What separates this football ballot from all of them is the combination of a once-a-season window, a town-anchored nominee list, and a published vote count that lets supporters see exactly how many ballots separated the top finishers.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Because this is a turnout race inside a single February window, support here is built before the deadline, not after it. The nominee list is town-anchored, so the natural first move is mobilizing the community already attached to the name: team families, the school's followers, and the town groups that already share local sports news. A direct link to poll.fm/16616055 removes every step between a supporter and the submit button, which matters more on a plain poll than any clever messaging.

Timing is the second lever. With the window falling in February and no printed open date, watching the ballot page for the moment it goes live lets a campaign start while the field is still settling, rather than entering a race the leading nominee has already pulled away in, as the 2025 gap between the top two totals illustrates.

On outside help, the organizer's position is simply unstated: Imperial Valley Press has printed no rule about purchased votes or voting software on this ballot. Supporters weighing that route can read how vote purchasing works in general on our award votes page, and should weigh it against the risk that the current edition carries a rule the page does not advertise.