The Taunton Daily Gazette Football Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the Taunton Gazette runs this poll

Each week of the fall season, the Taunton Daily Gazette Football Player of the Week hands one decision to the public: which football performance deserves the paper's weekly honour. The organizer is the Taunton Daily Gazette, a Massachusetts newspaper publishing at tauntongazette.com, and the market it serves is the Taunton area of southeastern Massachusetts. Every fall Friday night produces standout performances across the paper's coverage area, and the poll exists to let readers, families and classmates decide which one tops the week.

The ballots are Crowdsignal polls, and the confirmed voting URL for the series is poll.fm/16285438. A recent ballot in the series asked readers to choose the Week 11 Player of the Week, and its options paired nominated players with schools including Taunton, Bridgewater-Raynham and Bristol-Plymouth. That pairing of player and school is the format every week: the paper names the nominees, the community picks among them.

What makes this ballot different from a one-off contest is its rhythm. It is not a single championship vote but a weekly series that tracks the season, so the same community returns to it every week from September through November. That repeat audience is the reason the poll matters locally: winning a week here is a talking point in school halls and on local sports pages alike, and the Gazette treats each week's result as part of its fall coverage.

The dated record for the Taunton football poll

Two seasons of this series are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. Within each season the poll runs weekly, and the ballots fall between September and November, matching the high school football calendar in Massachusetts. The series is annual on the strength of those two consecutive fall runs, and the pattern points toward a 2026 series, though the paper announces each new season through its own sports desk rather than a standing calendar.

The clearest dated fact attached to the series is the shape of a weekly window. One recent ballot was open through noon on Sunday, Sept. 27, which shows the Gazette's habit of letting the week's vote run across the weekend and closing it at midday Sunday. That gives supporters a Friday-to-Sunday window in practice, but the opening and closing times are set week by week with each new question.

Several facts about the series are not published anywhere the organizer maintains. The Gazette has not printed a standing list of award categories beyond the weekly player question, nor a season-long prize description, and future weeks' opening and closing times follow the paper's publishing schedule rather than a public calendar; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

For a supporter planning around the series, the practical reading is this: expect a new poll most weeks of the season, expect each one to close on a weekend deadline similar to the noon Sunday close already seen, and treat the Gazette's sports coverage as the announcement channel for each week's nominees and deadline.

How a supporter votes in the Taunton Gazette poll today

Voting takes only a minute. A reader opens the current week's poll on Crowdsignal, sees the list of nominated players each shown with his school, selects one, and submits. No nomination round sits in front of the vote for the reader: the Gazette compiles the nominee list itself from the week's games, and the ballot the reader sees is the voting stage.

The newspaper states its counting rules in its own words. Voting can only be done through the poll, with one vote per person for hour, and any votes submitted by email or other means will not be counted. Two things follow from that. First, the hourly return is the only legitimate way to vote more than once, so anyone who wants to repeat a vote waits out the hour and comes back to the same ballot. Second, campaigns that collect votes by email, text or comment achieve nothing, because the paper explicitly excludes them from the count.

The weekly close is the other deadline that shapes behavior. The recent ballot that stayed open through noon on Sunday, Sept. 27 shows the weekend pattern, which means the strongest push window is the final evening and Sunday morning before the midday close. Once the poll is marked closed, the result stands and the paper moves to the next week's question with a new nominee list.

Because this is a straightforward public vote on a Crowdsignal form, the paper's rules describe no account requirement and no tiered judging stage. The result is whatever the poll shows when it closes, which is exactly why organized, rule-abiding support has an outsized effect on the outcome compared with a single vote from one person.

How this poll sits beside its Massachusetts neighbours

The Taunton Gazette's football poll is one of several weekly and seasonal reader votes in Massachusetts high school sports, and it is worth seeing where it fits. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week serves its own region of northeastern Massachusetts, while the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week covers a neighbouring market to the north of Taunton. Both are newspaper-run reader votes like this one, but each belongs to a different publisher with a separate ballot.

Statewide programmes sit alongside the local ones. The Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week and the Massachusetts High School Baseball Player of the Week draw from a wider pool of schools, and the Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year crowns a full season rather than a single week. The Massachusetts High School Basketball Player of the Week runs the same weekly format in a winter sport.

What distinguishes the Taunton poll within this set is its tight focus: one newspaper, one sport, one coverage area. A nominee here competes only against other football players from the Gazette's coverage area in the same week, not against a statewide field, so a mobilized local community carries more weight per vote than it would on a broader ballot. For supporters deciding where to concentrate effort, that narrower field is the structural advantage of this poll over the statewide alternatives.

Strengthening support within the Gazette's rules

Support in this poll compounds through repetition, not volume in a single moment. Because the Gazette allows one vote per person for hour, a small group that returns every hour from Friday evening through the Sunday noon close outperforms a larger group that votes once. Build the reminder loop first: a team group chat with an hourly nudge beats any one-time blast, and the weekend window before the midday close is where the poll is won or lost.

Keep every push inside the paper's stated rules. Votes cast by email or any channel other than the poll are not counted, so forwarding the poll link is the only distribution that matters. Share the link with alumni pages, booster groups and family networks, and say plainly when the close is: a recent ballot ran through noon on Sunday, Sept. 27, and each week's deadline is printed with its poll. For broader tactics that fit hourly public votes like this one, see how to get more votes online, and for award-format ballots generally, the award votes page puts this poll's format in context.