Daily News Fans Preseason Boys Basketball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Daily News preseason boys basketball poll is and who runs it

The Daily News Fans Preseason Boys Basketball Player of the Year belongs to Imperial Valley Press, a newspaper organization, and asks Massachusetts readers to crown a boys high school basketball standout before the winter season tips off. The program name ties the vote to the Daily News, the publication whose audience supplies both the nominee field and the support. Poll.fm, a Crowdsignal property, carries the ballot at https://poll.fm/16397611.

Within the sport vertical, this program works as a straightforward public vote: the options are the nominees themselves, and whoever gathers the most support takes the title. Every option pairs a player with his school, and those schools sit in Massachusetts communities including Milford, Ashland, Holliston, Marlborough, Medway and Millis. Individual nominees go unnamed on this page, since each cycle brings a fresh roster and the current ballot alone lists it in full.

Because the award is preseason, it measures expectation rather than performance. That shapes who votes: backers of programs with returning talent, and local readers following high school basketball coverage, arrive early in the window and settle the result before a single league game has been played.

The dated record for this Massachusetts preseason basketball vote

Three cycles are confirmed for this award: 2022, 2024 and 2025. The list skips 2023, and nothing published explains the missing year, so the honest reading is that only those three winters are on the books. The program is annual in shape, and 2026 is where a fresh cycle would fit if the recent pattern holds, though no organizer announcement for a 2026 ballot is part of the confirmed material.

The timing that is established is the month: each confirmed cycle's voting window fell inside December, opening and closing within that single month, which is what makes the award a preseason fixture rather than a mid-season or end-of-season honor. Day-level dates, nomination rounds and any platform round structure are a different matter. Imperial Valley Press has not printed the day the current preseason ballot opens or closes, any per-supporter voting limit, or the eligibility rule for nominees; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Two practical consequences follow from that gap. First, a supporter who wants to vote early cannot plan around a published opening day and should simply check the poll.fm address as December approaches. Second, anyone coordinating support for a nominee has no published deadline to aim at, so the end of the December window is the only firm boundary the confirmed material offers.

How a supporter votes on the Daily News preseason ballot today

Voting takes three steps. The first move is visiting https://poll.fm/16397611, where the poll loads under its full title with the nominee list beneath it. Each option pairs one player with his school, covering boys basketball programs across the Massachusetts communities the ballot draws from. The second step is tapping the circle next to one nominee, and the third is pressing the button beneath the options, after which the Crowdsignal ballot returns a confirmation view showing the choice went in.

No account creation sits in front of the vote. The published page shows no sign-in step between opening the poll and choosing a nominee, which keeps the barrier to participation as low as a fan vote can be. Repetition is the open question: nothing on the page fixes how often one person may vote, whether a daily return is permitted, or whether the platform applies any verification after submission. Anyone intending multiple visits needs the current ballot's own wording rather than a rule assumed from an earlier edition.

One more feature of the action matters for nominees and their communities. Because the ballot is single-choice, every supporter's click lands fully on one player, and there is no second-place or write-in path to split attention. The entire outcome rests on which nominee's network turns its clicks into submissions inside the December window.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts neighbour programs

Massachusetts carries a busy slate of high school fan votes; this preseason award counts among six sibling programs on the same site. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week are weekly recognition votes tied to their own publishers, while the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week run on a weekly rhythm across sports and within basketball respectively.

Two further siblings round out the set: the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week covers the spring sport, and the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year crowns a completed softball season instead of running weekly.

What separates the Daily News preseason vote from all of them is timing and scope. It is the only one framed before the season, asking readers to project a player of the year in December, and it hands out a single trophy rather than running as a recurring weekly series. That gives it a short, concentrated window in which a nominee's supporters must act, where the weekly programs reset their audiences every cycle and the softball honor arrives after the games are done.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this preseason vote

Winning this ballot is a turnout exercise: opening the poll.fm page, selecting the nominee and submitting before the December window closes. Because the vote is single-choice and needs no account, the ask is small, which makes direct sharing effective. A nominee's strongest assets are the school community behind him, family and teammate networks, and local basketball groups already following preseason coverage in Milford, Holliston, Marlborough and the other towns the ballot draws from.

No rulebook exists for this poll in published form, so Imperial Valley Press neither endorses outside vote services nor prints a penalty schedule. What is certain is the shape of the ballot: a short preseason window in which late pushes have little room, which rewards supporters who start early in December rather than clustering at the end. Methods that fit a single-choice public ballot like this one are treated on the award votes page, and any outside help should be weighed against the organizer's live wording before committing.