The Herald News Preseason Fan's Choice Girls Volleyball Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

The Herald-News runs this Massachusetts volleyball vote each September

The Herald-News publishes The Herald News Preseason Fan's Choice Girls Volleyball Player of the Year, a Massachusetts fan vote that opens before the girls volleyball season itself begins rather than after it ends. The current round sits at poll.fm/16015832, the address Crowdsignal issues for this particular preseason ballot.

A September 22, 2026 article on The Herald-News's own site confirms the ballot is live for the 2026 season, describing it as the 2026 Herald News Fan's Choice Preseason Girls Volleyball Player of the Year ballot. That same article is the clearest evidence of how the paper names its own program from one year to the next.

Three volleyball seasons carry a confirmed edition of this preseason format, 2022, 2025, and 2026. Two of those years, 2025 and 2026, run back to back; 2022 stands alone as an earlier confirmed year, separated from 2025 by a gap the page does not explain.

The dated record behind three preseason editions

The clearest dated fact available is the month itself. The Herald-News's own site confirmed the 2026 edition was live as of September 22, 2026, inside an article whose headline points readers straight to the ballot. Beyond naming that month, the page does not carry a day-level opening date, a closing date, or a specific deadline for the preseason vote.

Three editions carry a confirmed year on this format, 2022, 2025, and 2026. The back-to-back pair, 2025 and 2026, suggests The Herald-News has settled into running this preseason vote every fall immediately before the volleyball season itself, while the standalone 2022 year shows the format existed at least once earlier without a matching confirmed run directly beside it.

Past the calendar, the page settles almost nothing else. A category list wider than this one volleyball honor, a stated per-voter limit, and eligibility rules for who can appear on a given year's ballot are all missing; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Casting a vote on the current preseason ballot

Voting itself is a single step once a reader reaches the right page. The current round sits at poll.fm/16015832, Crowdsignal's address for The Herald-News's preseason volleyball vote; a reader selects one nominee from the list and submits before the round closes.

Because the vote runs ahead of the volleyball season rather than after it, the practical timing question is different from a typical postseason award. A supporter is choosing a preseason favorite from whichever players The Herald-News has already lined up for that year's ballot, not casting a vote based on a season's worth of results already played. September 2026 is confirmed as when this round is running; how many weeks that window stays open, or when The Herald-News shifts its coverage toward the season itself, is not printed on the page.

Nothing about the poll.fm mechanic itself is unusual for this platform. What sets The Herald-News's version apart is the timing, tied to a girls volleyball season that has not yet started rather than one that has already finished.

How a preseason volleyball vote compares with Massachusetts's other polls

Six other Massachusetts fan-vote programs share the same general landscape as this one, and most of them run on a different calendar entirely. A "Week" program refreshes on a rolling basis all season long; a "Year" program, like the Gatorade softball award, waits until a season's results exist before naming one winner. The Herald-News's ballot does neither: it names its honoree before the girls volleyball season has played a single match.

None of these six results feed back into The Herald-News's own ballot, and a strong showing here carries no weight toward a weekly poll covering a different sport or a season-ending award decided months later. A Massachusetts reader who follows several of these programs at once is tracking separate ballots on separate calendars, even where the underlying idea, a fan vote for a favorite player, looks similar from one program to the next.

Building support before the season starts

The Herald-News's own page for this preseason volleyball vote publishes no rules section addressing outside help or automated activity, unlike some contest platforms that spell out a policy in plain text. Nothing there promises safety for automated traffic, and nothing rules out ordinary word-of-mouth support; the page does not address either possibility.

What a Massachusetts volleyball team or booster group can control directly is reach, sharing the poll.fm link for the current edition with actual teammates, classmates, and parents while the preseason window stays open. Because this vote runs before the season itself, building support here means acting on a September timeline rather than waiting for a postseason deadline the way some other honors work. General tactics for building real momentum behind an online ballot, rather than guessing at rules The Herald-News has not published, are covered in this site's guide to getting more votes online.