The Taunton Daily Gazette Fans' Choice Mid Field Hockey Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Taunton Gazette Fans' Choice field hockey ballot is

Readers decide the Fans' Choice Mid Field Hockey Player of the Year, an award run by the Taunton Daily Gazette, a Massachusetts newspaper whose coverage area centers on Taunton. It belongs to the paper's Fans' Choice franchise, a family of public-vote ballots in which readers, not a panel of judges, decide the winner. The vertical is high school sport, and the honor is specific: a mid-season field hockey player of the year, chosen while the fall season is still in progress rather than after it ends.

A typical Fans' Choice ballot asks readers to pick a weekly athlete across every sport; this one narrows to a single sport and a single milestone in the season. That makes it closer in spirit to a season award than to the weekly honors the paper and its sister publications run, and it means the pool of nominees is drawn from field hockey rosters in the Gazette's coverage area. The 2025 ballot listed nominees identified with Taunton and with the Dighton-Rehoboth and Bridgewater-Raynham school programs, all high school players, so the field is described here rather than the students on it.

Crowdsignal hosts the ballot through its poll.fm service, and the 2025 edition lives at poll.fm/16091456. That poll is marked closed, which is the normal state for a mid-season award once its window ends. The table below sets out the program's fixed facts.

The dated record for this mid-season field hockey award

Two runs of the Taunton Daily Gazette's mid-season field hockey ballot are documented: 2022 and 2025. Those are the only years the program appears, and the gap between them deserves a careful read: a 2022 ballot and a 2025 ballot show the award returning after a pause, which is why it counts as an annual program instead of a one-off. Nothing published states that every year in between carried a ballot, so the honest description is that the documented runs are 2022 and 2025.

Voting for the 2025 edition took place in September, which fits a mid-season honor for a fall sport: field hockey seasons in Massachusetts start in early September, so a mid-season honor lands naturally in the middle of that month. The 2025 ballot carried the title "Who is the 2025 Taunton Daily Gazette Fans' Choice Mid-Season Field Hockey Player of the Year?" and is now marked closed on Crowdsignal.

Several facts about the schedule are unpublished. The Gazette has never printed the day the 2025 window opened or the day it closed, and it has not printed the dates for any future round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The paper also prints no category list on the ballot, no repeat-vote ceiling, and no eligibility rule for nominees. Anyone planning around the next edition should treat the September placement of the 2025 window as the best available guide and check the live poll.fm page when the fall season approaches.

How a supporter votes in the Gazette's field hockey poll

Voting happens as a plain public tally on Crowdsignal's poll.fm ballot. A supporter opens the ballot, reads the question, which in 2025 asked who the mid-season field hockey player of the year is, and selects one nominee from the list. Each nominee on the 2025 ballot was identified by name together with the high school program she plays for, so a reader can find a player from a specific school without guessing. Pressing the vote button logs the choice, and Crowdsignal adds it to the running tally.

No sign-in is printed as a requirement on the ballot, and the Gazette has published neither a repeat-vote ceiling nor a daily-return rule for the poll. That silence matters for planning: anyone hoping to vote repeatedly has no published rule to lean on, and the only safe course is to obey whatever rules the live ballot itself enforces when a new edition opens. The 2025 poll is closed, so no vote cast on it now counts toward anything.

Because each nominee plays high school field hockey, support campaigns around this ballot look different from campaigns around a business award. The natural base of support is the school community: teammates, families, students and local field hockey followers whom the Gazette's coverage already reaches. Sharing the poll.fm link directly, rather than a screenshot or a secondhand description, is what actually moves votes, since the ballot is the only place a choice can be logged. Once the poll closes, Crowdsignal displays the final tally, so the result of the 2025 mid-season field hockey vote is visible to anyone who opens the page.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts siblings

Massachusetts has a dense field of public-vote sports ballots, and this one is distinguished by its timing and its narrowness. The Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week run on weekly cycles across all sports, resetting every seven days with a new nominee pool. The Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week do the same within single sports. The Taunton Gazette's mid-season field hockey ballot instead appears once per fall season and honors a single milestone.

That difference changes how support works. A weekly ballot rewards a fast, concentrated push inside its short window; a mid-season award gives a school community a longer runway but a single chance, since the poll closes and does not reopen. The Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year is a useful contrast on the other side: it is a year-end honor with a selection process behind it, while the Gazette's field hockey ballot is decided purely by the public tally on Crowdsignal.

The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week rounds out the sibling set, and all of these programs share the same underlying shape: a Massachusetts publisher, a Crowdsignal or similar public ballot, and a winner decided by reader votes. What separates the Taunton field hockey ballot is its mid-season placement in September, its single-sport focus, and its anchor in the Gazette's Taunton-area coverage, where field hockey has a genuine local following.

Strengthening support in the Gazette's field hockey vote

Winning support in the Gazette's field hockey ballot means reaching the Taunton-area community while the poll is open. The 2025 window sat in September, so the practical season for a campaign is the first half of the fall schedule, before the mid-season mark passes and the ballot closes. Because the nominees play for programs including Taunton, Dighton-Rehoboth and Bridgewater-Raynham, the audience that actually votes is the school community the Gazette already covers, and messages that travel through team group chats, booster networks and school social accounts reach it far better than public posts.

The organizer's published position on outside help is silence: no rules for the ballot appear anywhere, so there is no stated allowance or prohibition to point to. What the format does publish is the vote itself, a public tally on Crowdsignal, which means the result is visible and any pattern the organizer dislikes is visible too. The safest framing for any supporter effort is honest mobilization of people who genuinely follow the player, and the general question of paying for votes in polls like this is laid out at award votes.