Who is The Gardner News Girls Soccer Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Gardner News Girls Soccer Player of the Year vote is

Each soccer season, The Gardner News, a newspaper serving Gardner and its surrounding communities in Massachusetts, asks its readers to settle one question: which local girls soccer player deserves the year's title. The award is reader-driven from start to finish, with no judges and no panel, and the paper publishes at thegardnernews.com. The ballot lives on Crowdsignal, the service that operates poll.fm, and the confirmed address for this program is https://poll.fm/16320101.

The format is a plain fan ballot. Anyone who opens it sees the question and a list of nominees, each shown with the school she represents. There is no nomination round described, no judges' panel and no bracket; the reader's selection is the entire mechanism. The nominees in confirmed cycles come from high school programs across the paper's north-central Massachusetts coverage area, with Gardner itself among the schools represented.

Because the ballot is a single question rather than a multi-category readers' contest, the program is closer to a player-of-the-year award than to a broad best-of poll. That shapes how support works: every vote goes to the same question, so a nominee's total is built entirely on one list of options rather than spread across several categories.

The dated history for this soccer award

Confirmed editions of the program ran in 2010, 2022, 2024 and 2025. The spread is uneven: an early edition in 2010, a return in 2022, and then back-to-back cycles in 2024 and 2025. The most recent confirmed run is the 2025 edition, and the paper's pattern points to a 2026 cycle, though only a posted ballot settles that.

The voting window in the confirmed cycles falls in November and December, which matches the rhythm of a fall high school soccer season in Massachusetts: the poll collects reader verdicts as the season concludes. Exact opening and closing dates for any given cycle are not printed ahead of time; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Several details sit outside the confirmed material. The ballot page publishes no category list, which fits a single-question format but means there is nothing beyond the player-of-the-year question to check. No per-supporter rule, no daily-vote limit and no eligibility text has been published by the paper for this award. The Crowdsignal platform also runs scheduled round dates for some publishers, and none are posted for this market. Each of those gaps is filled, cycle by cycle, by whatever the live ballot prints when the paper posts it.

How a supporter votes in the Gardner News soccer poll

Voting here takes a supporter through three small actions. She or he opens the Crowdsignal ballot for the Girls Soccer Player of the Year, reads the nominee list, selects the player to back, and submits. The confirmed page describes no login, no email verification and no geographic gate; the choices are visible the moment the page loads, each nominee shown beside her school.

Because the ballot is a single question, a supporter's whole decision happens on one screen. There is no write-in box described, no second page and no confirmation round. After submitting, the Crowdsignal page typically shows the running results, though whether this paper exposes tallies is a detail the live ballot itself demonstrates.

What the page does not print is a rule about repeat participation. Some Crowdsignal polls allow a return visit each day and some do not, and The Gardner News has not published its choice for this award. A supporter planning to vote more than once should read whatever instruction the live ballot displays after the first submission, since the platform enforces exactly what the organizer configured. The same applies to any account requirement: nothing in the confirmed material describes one, so the ballot page is the only authority on whether verification is required this season.

How this ballot sits beside other Massachusetts public votes

Massachusetts carries a busy calendar of publisher-run public votes, and this program occupies a specific niche within it. Where statewide athlete-of-the-week formats rotate through every sport and school in the state, The Gardner News award narrows to a single sport, girls soccer, and a single coverage area around Gardner. That makes the electorate smaller and more local: the people voting are, in large part, the paper's own readers and the school communities whose players are named.

Several neighbouring programs are worth comparing. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week runs a weekly rotation from a different Massachusetts publisher, while the Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week does the same for the Brockton market. The Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year shows what a state-level player-of-the-year format looks like in a sister sport. Weekly formats also include the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week, the baseball player of the week and the basketball player of the week.

The difference that matters for supporters is cadence and scope. A weekly ballot resets every few days and rewards fast, concentrated pushes; this annual soccer title runs a single November and December window and rewards sustained support across the whole period, with every vote in the cycle counting toward the same question.

Strengthening support in this soccer ballot

Support in this program flows through a single Crowdsignal question, so every action a nominee's backers take should end at https://poll.fm/16320101 during the November and December window. The most effective push for a local high school award is direct: the player's family, teammates and school community sharing the ballot link with a plain request to select her name. Because the nominee list shows each player beside her school, a school-wide audience can be mobilized around its own nominee without any explanation of the format.

Timing matters in a window this shape. A push that starts when the ballot posts has the whole November and December span to accumulate support, while a push that waits for the final days depends on whatever per-supporter rule the live ballot enforces, and that rule has not been published by the paper. The Gardner News has not printed any statement about outside help or automated participation for this award, so anyone considering paid support should read the ballot's own terms first and understand that the organizer's decision governs. For a fuller treatment of methods that apply across public-vote contests, see our votes guide, and for the legal framing around paid support, the legality page sets out the general position.