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

What this award is, and how it differs from Massachusetts' weekly ballots

Most fan ballots covering Massachusetts high school sport run week to week. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week each reset on their own cycle, and the statewide Athlete of the Week ballot works the same way. This program is built differently: Fans Daily News asks its readers to choose a single Girls Hockey Player of the Year, an award covering a whole season of girls hockey rather than a single week of it.

The organizer is Fans Daily News, a publisher of fan-facing high school sports polls. Crowdsignal's poll.fm platform carries the ballot, and the 2026 edition lives at poll.fm/16996024. Voting is free and public: anyone with a browser can read the nominee list and cast a choice, with no account and no purchase involved on the publisher's side.

The vertical is sport, the market is Massachusetts, and the nominees are high school girls hockey players drawn from schools across the state; the 2026 ballot carried players from programs in towns including Hopkinton, Natick, Framingham, Ashland, Franklin and Shrewsbury. The table below sets out the essentials a supporter or a campaign needs before touching the ballot.

The 2026 ballot and the program's edition history

Two years anchor the published history: 2022 and 2026. The 2026 ballot carries the title 2026 Fans Daily News Girls Hockey Player of the Year, and the page now reads Poll Closed. Its window was accessible for a week, closing at noon on Thursday, May 21, which places the live cycle in May 2026. The ballot itself does not print the calendar date on which that week opened.

The published tally gives the page its hardest numbers. The leading nominee finished at 51 percent of the vote on 249 ballots, and the runner-up took 13 percent on 61 ballots. Those figures come straight from the closed poll page, and they show how concentrated a small, engaged hockey community's support can be.

Looking forward, the program is marked annual with a next expected run in 2027. Fans Daily News has not printed a category list for this award, so whether the ballot ever splits the player of the year question into classes, positions or side awards is not stated on the publisher's pages; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No eligibility rule and no cap beyond the hourly limit appear in the ballot text either, and the publisher has yet to announce when the next cycle's week begins.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot

The interaction takes under a minute. A supporter opens the ballot address, poll.fm/16996024, and finds a list of answers: each entry names a girls hockey player and the high school she represents. The supporter marks the choice and submits. That is the whole exchange; there is no login, no form to fill out and no fee at any point.

The pace of voting is governed by a rule the publisher states outright: one vote per person per hour. During the open week that rule lets a committed supporter return again and again, with each fresh hour unlocking another choice. Once the poll closes, as the 2026 ballot has, the page remains up as a read-only results display showing the final percentages and vote counts.

Because the ballot is carried on Crowdsignal's poll.fm infrastructure, the address stays stable for the life of the poll. A supporter who bookmarked the 2026 page can revisit it to see the outcome, but a new edition will get its own address, which the publisher announces through its own sports coverage rather than through any separate signup.

How this award sits beside its Massachusetts siblings

Massachusetts readers have no shortage of fan ballots, and this single-question award is easy to tell apart from its neighbours. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week are weekly formats tied to their own publishers and coverage areas. The Massachusetts Athlete of the Week, the baseball player of the week ballot and the basketball player of the week ballot all run on the same weekly rhythm in other sports.

The closest structural cousin is the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year, which is also a season-capping award rather than a weekly format, though it covers softball instead. What sets the Fans Daily News ballot apart is the sport, girls hockey, and the publisher's single-question shape: the entire ballot is a player of the year choice, with no other categories attached to it.

For anyone backing a nominee, the difference shows up in practice. A weekly ballot rewards fast mobilisation inside a short window that resets constantly, while this award concentrates a whole season of support into a single week of voting each May, with the hourly rule deciding how often a dedicated backer can act.

Making support count within the hourly rule

Support in this program is a timing exercise. The window runs for a week each May, and the publisher's stated rule allows a fresh choice every hour, so the supporters who matter are the ones who treat the ballot as a daily habit rather than a single visit. Sharing the poll.fm address directly with teammates, classmates and hockey families is the most reliable organic lever, and our guide to getting more votes online collects tactics that travel across fan ballots of this kind.

On outside help, the ballot text states the hourly limit and nothing further about assistance, so any broader push sits in ordinary campaign territory. Our award votes page describes how purchased support is arranged for polls like this, and neither it nor any other approach changes the ballot's own terms, which remain the hourly limit and the closing bell at the end of the week.