Girls Track & Field Fans Preseason Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the preseason girls track poll is and who runs it

MetroWest Daily News runs the Girls Track & Field Fans Preseason Player of the Year as a fan award for high school girls track and field. The paper is the daily newspaper covering the Metro West region of Massachusetts, and the award belongs to the sports vertical. It is a preseason exercise: the publisher opens the poll before the outdoor season begins so readers can size up the field and back their choice early.

Crowdsignal, the polling host at poll.fm, carries the ballot, the platform many newspaper sports desks use for reader votes. The confirmed voting page for the program is poll.fm/15251396, which carried the 2025 edition under the title "2025 Girls Track & Field Fans Preseason Player of the Year (Poll Closed)". The page title itself signals the format: one poll, one list of nominees, one winner decided by fan votes.

The nominee list pairs athletes with their high schools across the Metro West coverage area. Schools and communities named on the 2025 ballot include Blackstone Valley Tech along with programs from Bellingham, Natick, Wellesley and Ashland, which gives a sense of the geographic spread the publisher draws on. The poll is a readers' award in the same family as the paper's other fan votes, but it is scoped to one sport, one gender and one moment in the calendar, the weeks before the spring season starts.

The dated facts: editions, the March window and what is unpublished

Two editions of this poll are on the calendar: 2023 and 2025. Two years on the calendar make this a recurring spring fixture rather than a one-off, and they anchor the expectation that a further edition follows each spring. The 2025 ballot is explicitly marked closed on its Crowdsignal page, so the most recent completed cycle is fully accounted for.

The 2025 window is the one dated fact the ballot itself carries: voting ran for one week, closing at noon on Tuesday, March 30. The publisher's own coverage of the poll states that sentence directly, and it fits the preseason pattern, a short burst of voting in March before the outdoor track season gets under way. The overall timing for the program falls in March, from the start of the month to the end of it.

Several terms of the poll are not published anywhere the organizer maintains. MetroWest Daily News has not printed the ballot's category structure, any per-supporter vote limit, or eligibility rules for nominees or voters; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The exact opening day of the next edition is likewise unannounced, since the publisher dates each round when it launches the ballot rather than publishing a standing calendar.

One result from the 2025 ballot is on the page: the leading option finished with 46 percent of the vote on 3,921 votes cast. That figure comes from the closed poll page itself and is the only published tally for the program.

How a supporter votes in the MetroWest preseason track poll

Voting happens on a Crowdsignal ballot that takes one selection per supporter. A supporter opens poll.fm/15251396, reads the list of preseason girls track and field nominees, selects the radio button beside one athlete, and presses the vote control to submit. The platform logs the choice at once, and running totals sit beside each option on the page, which is how the 46 percent figure for the leading 2025 nominee became visible once the poll closed.

Three practical points shape the experience. First, the ballot is a single-choice list, not a ranking and not a write-in form, so the whole decision happens on one screen. Second, the 2025 page sets no ceiling on repeat voting, omits any daily return rule, and leaves the account question open; the publisher has kept those terms unstated, and the live form's own behavior is the only guide when a new round is open. Third, the window is short. One week is all the 2025 edition allowed, closing at noon on a Tuesday, so a supporter who waits until the final day has very little room if anything goes wrong.

Because the confirmed page is the closed 2025 ballot, a supporter arriving today sees the finished result rather than a live vote. The next preseason round replaces this page when MetroWest Daily News launches it, and the publisher announces the new window in its sports coverage at that point.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts siblings

Massachusetts has a dense field of publisher-run fan votes, and this poll is unusual within it. Most of the neighboring programs are weekly awards: the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Eagle-Tribune's weekly athlete ballot both refresh their nominee lists every week during a season, while the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week do the same for their sports. This program instead runs once, in March, before the track season, and crowns a preseason favorite rather than a weekly one.

The Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week shares the weekly rhythm from a different publisher, and the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year is the closest structural cousin in that it names a player of the year, though it covers softball and follows the Gatorade program's own format rather than a newspaper fan vote.

What makes this ballot distinct, then, is the combination of publisher, sport and timing: a Metro West daily newspaper, girls track and field specifically, and a single preseason window in March rather than a rolling series. For a supporter, that means one concentrated push inside a seven-day window instead of repeated weekly campaigns, and it means the nominee list is fixed at launch rather than rolling with each week's results.

Strengthening support for a nominee in this preseason poll

The short window is the defining constraint. With one week of voting closing at noon on a Tuesday, a support effort for a Metro West nominee has to be front-loaded: circulate the poll.fm link the day the ballot goes live, reach the school's track families and boosters in the first days, and remind people before the final afternoon rather than after the deadline has passed.

The organizer's stated position is silence: MetroWest Daily News prints no rule about outside help, vote software or automated voting on the preseason ballot page, so nothing published either permits or prohibits it. What the poll is built to measure is genuine fan participation across the Metro West community, and a nominee whose support is broad and visible benefits from that in a way no shortcut reproduces.

For a fuller treatment of tactics that work on publisher fan polls of this kind, see how to get more votes online, and for the wider legal and rules picture around purchased votes, is buying votes legal sets out the general position.