The Taunton Daily Gazette Boys Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Taunton Daily Gazette Boys Athlete of the Year is and who runs it

Each school year the Taunton Daily Gazette asks readers around Taunton, Massachusetts to name a Boys Athlete of the Year from the high school players its sports desk covers. The organizer is the Taunton Daily Gazette, a daily newspaper whose masthead publishes at tauntongazette.com and whose registry entry lists it as a Massachusetts newspaper. The ballot itself is hosted for the paper on poll.fm, the Crowdsignal polling platform, and the current voting address is https://poll.fm/15761969.

The format is a single question, who is the boys athlete of the year, answered by picking one name from the published list and submitting the choice. The answer options on the 2024-25 ballot were drawn from schools the paper covers, with Bridgewater-Raynham and Taunton both appearing among them. Since the nominees are minors competing in high school sports, the program is described here by publisher, sport level and season rather than by naming any individual athlete.

The vertical is sport, and the ballot is an award decided by readers rather than a business listing, aimed at the Gazette's readership in the Greater Taunton area. The table below gathers the program's fixed details, all drawn from the ballot page and the paper's own coverage of the award.

Dated facts behind the Taunton boys athlete award

The award's confirmed runs fall in 2022 and 2025, and the program earns its annual status from those two years. The 2024-25 edition's ballot carried the title Who is the 2024-25 Taunton Daily Gazette Boys Athlete of the Year, marked Poll Closed, and its published tally showed one Bridgewater-Raynham nominee at 44 percent.

The 2025-26 edition is the live cycle. The paper's own coverage states that polls are open through noon on Monday, Aug. 24, which matches the ballot's listed end date of Aug. 24, 2026. No opening day for the 2025-26 window is printed on the ballot or in the paper's story, so the start of voting is not pinned to a date here.

The Gazette has also not printed a breakdown of award categories for the boys athlete ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. What the published evidence does establish is a July timing footprint for the 2025 ballot and a late-August close for the 2025-26 cycle, which places the vote at the end of the school sports year rather than the start. Readers who want the exact day voting opened should look at the story that launched the poll on tauntongazette.com, since the paper publishes its athlete of the year coverage there alongside the ballot itself.

How a supporter votes in the Gazette's boys athlete poll today

Voting happens on the poll.fm ballot Crowdsignal hosts. A supporter opens the ballot page, reads the single question, clicks the choice beside one athlete's name and submits. The paper's stated rule for the 2025-26 poll allows one vote from each person every hour, and it says plainly that choices sent by email or by any other means will not be counted, so the poll widget is the only counting channel.

That hourly limit shapes how a campaign actually runs. Anyone wanting a second vote has to come back after an hour has passed and vote again from the same page, which makes the ballot a return-visit exercise across the days it stays open rather than a one-shot form.

The 2024-25 ballot is closed, so arriving at that older poll now shows the final tally rather than a vote control; the live address above is the ballot that accepts votes for the current cycle. No login, no registration step and no account requirement is described on the ballot page, and no eligibility rule for voters is printed there either. The mechanic is a straightforward reader poll, which is typical of newspaper athlete-of-the-year ballots: the barrier to voting is low, and the organizer's control comes from the hourly cap rather than from any verification step.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts neighbours

The Taunton Daily Gazette award sits in a crowded Massachusetts field of reader-voted school sports programs, and each one answers to its own publisher. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week runs out of the Merrimack Valley paper of the same name. The Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week belongs to the Brockton Enterprise. The Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year is a statewide softball award.

The Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week, the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week are statewide weekly programs.

What separates the Taunton ballot from those six is scope and rhythm. It is a single year-end question about boys athletes across all sports, run by one local newspaper for its own coverage area, rather than a weekly rotation tied to one sport or a statewide publisher. A reader in Taunton following the Gazette's sports section will meet this ballot once a school year, while the weekly programs ask for a vote every seven days. Links to each neighbouring program are listed below for readers comparing Massachusetts public-vote awards.

Building support for a Gazette boys athlete nominee

Winning support here comes down to the hourly rule. Because the Gazette counts a single vote from each person every hour and rejects email submissions outright, the practical way to build a lead is to organize people who can return to the poll repeatedly across the days the ballot is open. A coach or parent sharing the ballot link after practice, with a reminder that the poll closes at noon on Aug. 24, does more than a single burst of votes on the last morning.

The paper publishes no guidance encouraging outside vote purchasing, and its only printed controls are the hourly cap and the email exclusion. That means any purchased support would still have to arrive through the poll under the same hourly constraint as everyone else's. For a broader look at methods that work on public polls like this one, see our votes guide, and for the rules question see whether buying votes is legal.