Daily News Hockey Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Daily News Hockey Player of the Week is and who runs it

Under the Daily News name, Imperial Valley Press runs a high school hockey honor decided entirely by public vote, carried on Crowdsignal, whose ballots live at poll.fm. The program covers the sport vertical within the Massachusetts market, and its ballot takes the weekly reader-poll format newspapers use to let communities rally behind their own teams during the winter season.

What separates this ballot from most of its Massachusetts neighbours is the sport. The statewide athlete programs in the state, such as the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week, spread the nominee pool across every fall, winter and spring sport. This ballot is hockey only, which means a school's hockey families are not competing against the whole athletic department for the same weekly title, and the nominee list stays inside one sport's community.

The towns behind the 2025 nominee pool reach across the MetroWest stretch of Massachusetts: Bellingham, Hudson, Framingham, Marlborough, Wellesley and Hopkinton all appear among the matched option schools, alongside named programs such as Lincoln-Sudbury, Hopedale, Medway, Algonquin and Dover-Sherborn/Weston. That footprint gives the ballot a genuinely regional character rather than a single-town base.

The dated record behind the Daily News hockey ballot

The Daily News Hockey Player of the Week shows confirmed editions in 2023 and 2025. That pair of years is what makes the program qualify as annual, and it also means the ballot has skipped a visible year in the middle of its published history. Nothing on the ballot or in the publisher's materials explains the gap between 2023 and 2025, so readers should treat the run as confirmed in those two years and unproven in between.

The 2025 edition carried a precise window in its own headline: the ballot covered Feb. 24 through March 2, and the page now displays Poll Closed beside that range. That places the hockey vote squarely in the late-winter stretch of the Massachusetts high school season, when league schedules are winding toward playoffs and weekly performance is fresh in voters' minds.

What Imperial Valley Press has not published for this program is equally relevant. The ballot carries neither a stated vote ceiling nor eligibility wording, no category roster beyond the lone player-of-the- week framing, and no nomination-round dates appear anywhere; the exact window dates for each new round should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher's next expected edition falls in 2026, but no opening date for that cycle has been posted.

For a weekly series, the practical consequence is that each ballot is short-lived. A window that opens on a Monday and closes within the same week gives a school community a narrow runway, which is why the tallies on these polls move quickly once the link starts circulating.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm hockey ballot

The mechanic on the Daily News hockey ballot could hardly be simpler. To vote, a reader loads the Crowdsignal ballot at poll.fm/15139983, reads the list of that week's nominees, marks the radio button beside their chosen player and submits. No write-in box appears on the published ballot, and no account prompt stands between the visitor and the submit action. The page then reflects the choice in the running tally.

The 2025 edition shows what the results side looks like once a window closes. The leading entry, a pair from Dover-Sherborn/Weston, finished at 41 percent on 1,068 votes, with the Algonquin nominee close behind at 39 percent on 1,004 votes. A narrow margin after a full week of voting tells a supporter two things: the electorate is small enough that an organized school push genuinely decides the outcome, and the gap between winning and second place is measured in dozens of votes rather than thousands.

Because the ballot is hosted on poll.fm, the address for the current window changes as the series advances through the hockey season. The 15139983 ballot is the 2025 edition, now closed. During a live week the publisher's sports section carries the link to whichever ballot is open, and that link is the reliable entry point rather than an old poll.fm address from a previous week.

Supporters who want to see how the same public-vote mechanic runs in other Massachusetts programs can compare the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week, which uses a comparable select-and-submit format under a different publisher.

How this hockey ballot sits beside its Massachusetts siblings

Massachusetts carries a dense field of high school vote programs, and the Daily News hockey ballot is the only one of its neighbours devoted to a single sport. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week both run multi-sport nominee pools, so a hockey player there competes against swimmers and wrestlers for the same weekly honor. On the Daily News ballot, the entire electorate is hockey-focused.

The publisher picture is equally distinct. Each of these programs answers to a different newspaper operation, and the Daily News hockey vote is run by Imperial Valley Press while the Brockton ballot belongs to the Enterprise and the Eagle-Tribune program to its own Merrimack Valley paper. That matters for a supporter because nomination pools, window timing and promotion all follow the publisher, not the state.

Season shape separates the hockey ballot from its neighbours too. The Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week and the basketball equivalent follow spring and winter schedules respectively, while the Gatorade softball program is a year-end honor rather than a weekly vote. A hockey family planning a push therefore works a late-February calendar that none of the sibling pages share.

The net effect: smaller nominee pools, a tighter community, and a weekly window where a single school's turnout can swing the result in a way that statewide multi-sport ballots rarely allow.

Strengthening support during a Daily News hockey window

A weekly hockey window rewards early organization. Because the 2025 ballot closed with a narrow margin between the Dover-Sherborn/Weston pair and the Algonquin nominee, a school community that mobilizes its team families during the opening days of a window holds a real advantage over one that waits for a final-day push. Sharing the poll.fm link directly through team group chats, the athletic department's channels and local hockey circles is the core tactic, and it works precisely because the ballot's electorate is small and hockey-specific.

Imperial Valley Press prints no rules text on the hockey ballot about outside help or purchased votes, so the organizer's position on either is unstated. That gap is worth remembering before any supporter considers a shortcut: with no published rule, the live ballot's behaviour during an open window is the only observable authority. The mechanics that are fully within a community's control, from timing the first share to repeating the ask across the week, are laid out at get more votes online.